A Letter to My Mother on What Should Have Been Her 95th Birthday | Sarah Freligh

Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story.

--Alexander Chee

Yesterday I woke up from a nap to your voice

saying my name like it was dinnertime and you

were standing at the foot of the stairs calling up

to where I’d barricaded myself in the back bedroom

to sneak a cigarette. And I remembered how much

I hate the smell of old smoke. And it was two

in the afternoon on a rainy Monday, not dinner

or spring despite what the calendar says it should be,

and you should have lived as long as Dad has. 

At 97 he makes his own peanut butter and sends me 

home with jars of it and a zip-lock bag of chocolate-

covered almonds that I eat before I hit Ohio. 

Your house is so quiet now. Ghost slip in

and out of closets. Hangers sway where

your raincoat used to be before we gave it

away to Goodwill.  On the radio, the story

of a man who drove across a continent 

to hear his dead wife’s heart beat on in

the chest of a teenage boy. Listen: 

I’ll keep an ear out for your coat. 

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019-21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.