On Visiting My Mother in the Hospital and Not Finding Her There

By Amy Scattergood

In Chinese poetry the reader may guess
as to the whereabouts of the absent hermit.
It’s a conceit: a walking stick and an empty bowl.

My recalcitrant mother is not a poem.
She’s been sent home in her private uranium cloud,
which life or half-life we don’t know yet.

In Chinese poetry what the reader doesn’t know
is more important than a handful of rice
which is washed and washed of its skins.

So the hermit disappears. The rice is eaten.
But the uranium never really leaves us.
The clouds of spinning isotopes are as thick as heaven.

This article was originally published in Slake No. 3 To read all of the stories from that issue, purchase or subscribe at shop.slake.la.