By Kaley Hutter

Mother I’ve been listening to the bees, and I’ve decided to memorize
all their names, like how H knows the birds, and L can list
the countries in Africa, and I keep a spot open on the balcony

for our past selves, the ones who acted in Shakespeares
and learned fiction in Chapel Hill, and some days a bar of light
arrives there first, and I crouch above it reading Rilke till I believe

I’ve entered the lyric, and do you remember when I first played
you The Planets, how the eggs curdled as I lifted Jupiter
to your ear, and you stared at the stove with milky eyes, and the writer

in you whipped off a cowl, and you inhaled her home-scent
in watery swells, began to pour out the starry liquid of simile,
and Mother I’ve been trying to remember myself by remembering you,

you silent flat on your back in the Blue Springs hallway as P reads
to you aloud, you snarling when the cat invades the spaghetti,
you clammy-eyed clutching The Old Man and the Sea

on thin knees in Barnes & Noble, you carving saltless avocado
wedges into your mouth as though they’re apples, you trekking
the neighborhood in blue monochrome and lunging at grip-handles

of sky, you laughing, and I know in the rental at Redfields
you’re watching the light too, as it’s prologued itself shyly
against the orange cyclorama with diffused pink arms, and see now

how the sun ripens for visit, this stubborn star we trade back
and forth with the dusk like a tenderness we can’t skirmish away,
see how the thrushes rush below it like children, Mother I’ve been trying

on the slick gown of my anger and it will not fit over my chest,
but look now how the Blue Ridge opens like a wound,
can you see the billowing lap of sky lean down over us to tend it?

Kaley Hutter is a poet, essayist, and educator from Charlottesville. Her work appears or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Meridian, Witness, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an MFA candidate at Hollins University.