seventeen

 so i have to head out of paso fino. back to the barking horse. en la calle, donde amigos, gitana.

paso fino was an expensive respite from wondering where to go next. the house i built is off limits to me even as my mother becomes ever frail in the apartment upstairs. i feel lonely for her, like i want to make her tea and let her ramble, let her yell at me whatever abuse is left in her, it's not hers anymore, her wound is in her granddaughters, and childless me. 

i ache to hear her breathing, to know her fluttering heart has strong years of blood pumping yet. 

the biological body of an aquarian born just a few years before hiroshima and nagasaki, on the pacific, in hollywood. a body of working bone and great posture, rabbit teeth. i miss her already, i've missed her all these moons, i miss that she loved to put on make up to go to work at a job she was proud of and well esteemed. librarians are an exclusive league of actors, life can be scripted and told to utter student devotion. story telling is how civilizations evolved and collapsed. 

who needs virgil, homer or shakespeare, it's the future, librarians had harry potter and the kids loved to read. i've visited her in death at the beginning and forever more, i sit at her desk under prepared. the grade i made is always dismissive of the overtime or the record time put in. she only read my hot garbage once, it made her cry, like it was her fault i could scribble careful erotica. all of hollywood in a flash of unearthly origin, across the pacific vastness, gold on silicon, shone the babies scorched in honeypot mind games. a hyper competitive adultery. didn't say she saw it, just said she was there. 

let's say all the theories are true, and the pfizer vaccine turns you into a patented form of nonhuman, a genetic chimera, a trans, aquarian mom was the first to get hers to travel on an airplane between lockdowns to see the daughter who's never written a full essay to save her life, is that person no longer my mother? and is that why she only communicates to illicit the devoted response, her student captors, their estimation for her. who is this person then that can sell the property upon which i've built my house? 

"i loved covid" she said, remarking how nice it was to not see anybody. it was a signal to me that she prefers the solitude of her own company to the perplexed questioning of mine. so i can back off and let her be as she goes through the stages of bad posture and brittle bones. i've seen all the scenarios in the future, i've already gone through the staggering summits of grief and bereavement. i sat in the backseat while she napped in the front.