Each Time I Pull into Mom's Parking Spot
it's 1997, and there's Gram, alive, next to me in the passenger seat after an evening dash to Food Lion for baby things, the bananas she would mash later, fingers deft still at 89, running along the pale spines for strings, telling me how careful one has to be feeding babies. I reach over the armrest into the backseat, grab the grocery bag, a pack of diapers, only to drop them at the wail from Gram, face in hands, caught again, stuck in Alzheimer's web, a 1930s string of memory only she can see. Michael, Michael, she repeats a name I've never heard her say, syllables laced with a brand of pain I couldn't place until a decade later when the pink-capped nurses took my son's body away.
