Another Mother’s Day at the Garden Center
By C.L. Nehmer
What she wanted most for her mother was
that she could eat all the devil’s food cake
she wanted and her sugar would never
skyrocket or crash and burn, or her feet
go numb and the doctor say to write that
down, the nutritionist wag her finger;
needles to stay wrapped up in their boxes
and her friends who only ate salads at
luncheon to gobble down baskets of fried
breaded zucchini. And she wouldn’t need
a bathroom scale, another garden stone
platitude, or flats of stinky marigolds,
because instead of famished Peter Rabbits,
there’d be clean blood and peas in abundance.
C. L. Nehmer is the author of The Alchemy of Planes: Amelia Earhart’s Life in Verse. Her work has appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Visit www.clnehmer.com.