Babo Kamel

The cursor pulses likes a silent metronome of the not yet written

Images collage but last night’s dream
won’t give up its custody.

What I wanted to say
took refuge in a stranger’s mouth.

Without papers, I couldn’t cross the border. Not even
in the abstract. Last night’s silence returned my mother

to the inaudible, between the whoosh and squeeze of the machine.
The night she died, she lip-synced her own thoughts.

I brushed the hair from her forehead, and she closed her eyes.
It’s a lie, but that is the way I want to remember

instead of morphine’s cruel trick, a breath stopped
a gasp, a breath stopped, a gasp like a dress rehearsal

for the letting go. Each moment was a finale and then not.
How many times can you say goodbye between poles

of relief and regret. The dead leave us with more
to say and so the dialogue lingers, like a hawk riding

currents, then circling back. She didn’t believe in an afterlife
but she returns some evenings to the kitchen

when I am washing dishes she once loved
to say, if you hand me a towel , I will help you dry.

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Originally from Montreal, Babo Kamel’s work is published in reviews such as Whale Road Review, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, CV2, Poet Lore and Best Canadian Poetry 2020. She is a Best of the Net nominee and a six-time Pushcart nominee. Her chapbook, After, is published with Finishing Line Press. Find her at: babokamel.com