Lifecare Nursing Home, Crossvlle, Tennessee

by Jude Deason

Mother’s room is the first door on the left
past the glass wall of locked double doors
painted with tree trunks and a pumpkin.

On the half of the room not assigned to Mother,
my older sister watches from the made-up bed,
her husband on her right, her Chihuahua

curled in, asleep, on her left. “Look Mother,”
my sister says. Out the window,
two birdhouses hang from poles by a tree.

Mother’s contusions are healing.
Her new wheelchair reclines, though
her head falls, chin down,
but still I see her

in the kitchen of the house on Grand Avenue,
sobbing by the phone at the back door
of the house Dad built on Latham Street

on the day he fell off the moving truck
and landed on his head on the highway
trying to rescue a flying card table.

I feed her mashed potatoes with pureed gravy,
pureed Salisbury steak. Her roommate, Betty,
wanders the hall,
her red purse on her arm.