print previewback JORDAN RICE
Pre-Op
While my mother disowns me for everything I am becoming,
my son sleeps upstairs, his outline scrawled in grainy light
across the monitor. And my mother’s gone, the dead line reeling
its single tone. My legs ache, and I fear another blood clot—
what could break from such small dams to aneurism.
But the moon’s brighter than I remember, like colder nights
when pacing the drive I stood all hours at the entrance, looking up
the empty street, expectant as the antique dealer’s wife
in Watervliet, months before they closed, confused behind her register
as I progressed through shelves of rusted tools—awl and auger, level
and saw, rows of hand-hewn wooden boxes, shot-holed signs
for long-forgotten varieties of soda—
believing me her child, a family friend, finally a stranger, then apologizing
for her queerness with the story of her stroke in a Chicago restaurant,
her headache drowning the server’s voice, the room blacked to silence.
I settle in the rocker, searching each leg for knots beaded deep in muscle
and wait for my son to wake with hunger, so I can gather and tell him,
this is what people do for the inconsolable. 
Epithalamion
Latent
Pre-Op