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.