Alice Friman

after a visit to my mother

What did she ever want but to clean house, sing like Pavarotti with a rag? New slipcovers, face at the bottom of the silver bowl. Then suddenly, the magician drops a handkerchief and the body wanders, too small for its skin – her head, a summer melon in my hand. Five feet four to five feet nothing – the great vanishing into a pair of house...