by Britton Carducci
Mother’s Day
Dinner for the battered,
Downtrodden, homeless.
I expected worn faces
But was still struck:
By the weatheredness of them:
The cane-walking twenty-eight year old;
The newborn mother,
Whose sadness was visibly throbbing.
Glad I brought the bag of brand new infant clothes,
My baby never-born philanthropy.
I was struck
By the humany smell that saturated the room.
Know this: homeless women smell
Like old shit and greasy hair and vagina.
I cut the fat boy’s, the neglected boy’s steak,
I brought him mashed potatoes, more soda.
I made him laugh. He looked at me
Like I could be the mother he never had.
For that moment, I was.
He was mine. I was his.
I was stability. I was love. I know that, and I know
These are the moments that will kill him,
Deader than the father-inflicted cigarette burns
I saw there, plain as day, on his forearm.
Quicker than the mother sitting next to him,
Saying nothing but shutthefuckup shutthefuckup .
For him-- the fat boy, the neglected boy, the glimpses
Of what we take for granted:
These moments dangling before his nose
Like a carrot on a string--
These are the moments that will kill him,
And too, the children he will put cigarettes out on one day.
And I wish I had made some difference.
Britton Carducci is a recent graduate of Rutgers University. She is an aspiring poet and fiction writer who is eternally rubbing balm into the rope burn on her palms. She is the winner of The Crucible's National Flash Fiction Contest and has been published in Objet D'art, the literary magazine of Rutgers College. Despite the blisters, she hopes to slowly but surely learn the ropes of the publishing world.
