Featured Poet: lyn lifshin

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IN THE DREAM I'm wrapping things in mother's house up, sealing the calm, wrapping what's break able in towels. I stuff newspaper from 1947 in with the silver. My fingers ache from folding and pressing what ever I can touch in a box. My neck and shoulders, ankle and feet hurt. The boxes are piled so high they're close to toppling. I'm drained. Just see the cardboard tilting toward me. I think of her, my mother on the bed in the room where the rooms are wounded. She is wading through the packed boxes, waiting for the next move. Then I take an oblong box lighter than all the others, big enough for two huge dolls, but light, as if full of air. Then I realize it is my mother, lighter than the clothes and stuff animals, lighter than the red whale-shark that floated in some pool I lost the outline of, knotted or torn so the air leaked, would stay in as long as what was a knot held the last air from escaping, like my mother, now light as air _____________________