I don’t know how I figured out
about those pills. Maybe I asked her.
Maybe she thought it was best
to be honest. Or maybe she didn’t
say a word and neither did I.
I didn’t take one every day. Only
once in a while I went to her bathroom
casually, as if I might be looking
for shampoo, or Cashmere Bouquet powder,
and slipped a pill in my bathrobe pocket.
Red if I wanted to be knocked out.
Blue if I wanted a gentle rocking.
I loved that part, poised
in front of the cabinet
at the moment of theft,
eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
my heart pounding so loudly
I thought for sure she’d hear.
And then the plunge into my mother’s
strange dreamless sleep.
Wendy Mnookin’s new book, Dinner with Emerson, is being published by Tiger Bark Press in March 2016. Mnookin has taught poetry at Emerson College, Boston College, and Grub Street. She is now mostly retired to spend more time writing and enjoying her grandchildren. She lives with her husband in Newton, Massachusetts.
