Goodbye, Traumas of Christmases Past
The holidays left too much room for tears.
mental health day —
how about making it a whole year?
could use the break, lots to see and do,
while people string up lights on balconies
and I remember an empty tree with no baubles
the holidays were bare back then,
a day filled with more regret than promise,
with overnight hospital stays and rounds of doctors
while a feast was the cafeteria salad bar
and leftover candies from the nurses’ station
one year my mom thought she was in Rome
at a mass headed by the one and only Pope —
except that was just a televised broadcast
while her mind played tricks on her
from a medication mix-up with side-effects
one Christmas Eve I stared at myself
in the waiting room’s bathroom mirror
and wondered how I had aged in leaps
from a girl who’d just kissed eighteen
to a twenty-something losing her mother
