5.23.20—

Abstract

5.23.20— Daniel Lawless (bio) Keywords Danny, Lawless, memory, Galway, crayon, nursing home, present —from Poems à la minute In the Memory Care Rec Room it's Wednesday,Which means my mother has been 64 Washable Crayola-ing againThe same child's coloring book picture she loves, titled"Mary Ann and Her New Pal," which is pretty much as you'd imagine it,Except below her as usual in big block letters Mary Ann is Janice!!! her dead sisterIn Galway, filled head to toe with Hot Magenta,And her pal the Peaceful Tangerine horse whose slightly upturned squiggleOf a mouth she's offering a plump Cerulean apple to is her faithful husband Bob!!! Which is pretty much as you'd imagine it, terribly sad, demeaning, a nightmareWith that vampirish fluorescent lighting, the catheters and oxygen tanks, and those infantilizing bibs.But also, I think, maybe a little sweet? Because despite everything—which is a lot—Wouldn't it be nice to see things her way for once—dyschronometrically the head nurse calls it—a flamboyant kid-simple worldEndlessly repeating itself like this? To addressA long-departed sister so joyously, to take an orange horse for a husbandWith such a contented smile it's as if just then he couldn't think to want any miraculous thing elseBut this beautiful blue present? [End Page 312] Daniel Lawless daniel lawless's book The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With was published by Salmon Poetry in 2018. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street, FIELD, Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, upstreet, and other journals. He is a 2018–2019 recipient of a Shifting Foundation grant, holds editing workshops for the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, Plume Editions, and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.