Leslie Lindsay
I feel my mother’s face against my own.
Hovering.
A shroud, a mask.
I feel her heat; trapped energy.
I see it glow, pulse.
She’s calling out through time and space,
I’m here, do you sense me?
She is reaching across the chasm, her
Vibrations.
A sonic quality, one that cannot be spoken.
A heaviness.
Go, I want to say, leave.
But it’s her presence, within her absence
That remain.
My mother burrows like a wound, a scar—
Pink and tender
Like the infant daughter she bore.
A promise to the world, a delicate reminder.
That each generation moves forth seeking solace
Where none was before.
***
Leslie Lindsay is a mother, wife, and writer living in Chicagoland. Leslie is the award-winning author of Speaking of Apraxia (Woodbine House, 2012). Her work has been published in The Awakenings Review, Pithead Chapel, Common Ground Review, the Ruminate blog, Cleaver Magazine (both craft and CNF), The Nervous Breakdown, Manifest-Station, The Mighty, and forthcoming in Brave Voices Literary Magazine. Leslie is at work on a memoir about her mentally ill interior decorator mother and eventual suicide. She reviews books widely and interviews authors weekly, www.leslielindsay.com. Leslie is a former child/adolescent psychiatric R.N. at the Mayo Clinic.