Glass Mother
Mother cared dearly
for her crystal wine glasses,
remained stout,
a strict prohibitionist,
who filled her glass
to the top every morning
with skim milk.
She had her blueberry bagel.
I watched from the floor,
hovered over heater vents,
body curled to my chest,
nightie pulled under my toes—dozed,
head resting on little knob-knees.
Straight-backed and upright,
Mother swirled her glass
by the stem, read all 26 pages
of the Daily Times,
slowly, sunning herself
beneath dining room windows,
gazing as milk legs twirled
down the inside of her glass.
She glanced and smirked
at oblong shadows
that fell on comic faces
smiling back at her
with just pupils for eyes.
North winds raged,
through ice-flakes and dark clouds,
at window panes.
I made sack lunches,
snatched a Diet Coke
for my plastic pail,
waited at the bus stop
with Samantha.
Mother spent winters
between grays and sunlight,
sipped, stared, commanding
through her glasses,
determined she could glare
flakes back into the sky
one sip at a time,
sing sunlight to her side
with her right index finger
drifting along in crystal C-minor.
• • •
Labecca Jones currently teaches composition, creative writing, literature, and technical writing at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, CO. Her work has appeared in The Cimarron Review, The South Dakota Review, The New Writer, Mad Poets Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Switchgrass Review, and Spirit Wind Poetry Gallery.