NewPoetry

Ben Kline

This is the last poem I’ll write about my dead mother
this year. Good gin isn’t cheap, and time is a construct, a mother

to space and myth. My mother insisted we be
on time, early if we had any respect for her. What mother

would encourage tardiness? Time doesn’t want that
mother-fucking nonsense or sour vermouth
I’d say to my mother

if she weren’t coffin rotted,
though never to her face
I can’t remember. Mom said

I got my face from her side. Never mind
Dad’s big nose and blue eyes in mine, his great-
grandpa’s curls and jawline the same. My mother

wouldn’t like the amount of martinis I shake,
wouldn’t like this being my last poem about her
this year or any year she was or wasn’t my mother

in life or ghost space, a mom outside time, a myth
in lemon twist and morning particulates.
My mother didn’t like me

saying fuck or mixing up
stories about her race medals

with poems about her last electrons ascending
the exosphere, the sun another mother

I respected more than her, the mother I didn’t
really know, despite having time and space to mother

a book of poems about both of us giving up
on resolving our matters while we were still matter,

not a myth lineated around the rim
of a black hole or a gimlet coupe, no twist.