FINALLY A Poem My Mother Can Show Her Friends

by Bryan Borland

-by request

We cannot escape our mothers
in the kitchen, whether it be the boxes
in the cupboard, the kind of Hamburger Helper
we choose, the soap in which we soak
our dirty dishes.

We cannot escape our mothers
in our subconscious rhymes,
be they dactylic patterns
of the way we argue with our husbands
or nursery variations from storybooks that remain large
even as we age them away like a car
driving from the specks of our tupperware homes.

We cannot escape our mothers
nor would we want to, really,
despite those times we question everything
like surly teenagers, though more often
we are the sick children whose fevers are cooled
by their hands upon our foreheads.

© Bryan Borland

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