Detox

Kelli Rush

He’s out here in the hallway on his white feet,
standing, but he’s drought, he’s dug, a single bone.
He could’ve been dead three times in three years,
once in the bathroom of his boyhood, where I
used to dab his upturned, sun-round face with suds.
Now, he’s wire, he says, he’s shock, electric, ought to
join the dead, and I, the mother, follow that thought,
that ponderous bubble wobbling across the white sky
toward the boy in the puffy coat, running, to the him
I had and held, the song I sang to once,
not once, but often, lamplight from the hallway
bluing him in bed, with his always questions:
Mama, what’s it like if someone’s dead? Now,
he’s wistful, now, weepy that the bedside lamp
is cracked, now, he’s not sure why he needs
to be not dead. I hold out a pair of fleecy socks.
Can’t say why alive beats dead. Stand there. Ask
if he wants some honey and a slice of banana bread.

Kelli Rush lives in her native state of North Carolina and recently left the corporate world in Winston-Salem, where she wrote and edited for the tobacco industry. Her poems have appeared in the Hawaii Review, the Nantahala Review, Wicked Alice, Blaze Vox and the alumni magazine of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.