Light will move
through broken places
soften the edges
of empty spaces

—Julie Flanders

•••

Ma, I’m glad you’re not here to see
your baby car partially unclothed,
its innards exposed in a fenced

parking lot on a city alley.
It was, I thought, a small boo-boo,
but the car body gods have

deemed it a total loss, though
it doesn’t seem so to me.
We’re never a total loss, are we?

Confessing this into the air feels
like I’ve failed you, who gave me
your baby car when you could no

longer see well enough to drive it,
though you insisted otherwise.
“I can see the light,” you said

again and again, and we believed you,
we did, but from then on we drove
you places, me chauffeuring Mondays,

Donna on Thursdays, with drivers
you hired for other days. How odd
that I boo-boo’d the car, not you,

who drove tipsy more times than
we could count, though you always
insisted that you were “just fine.”

“Apparently you were,” I murmur
through blurry eyes, as I remove
what is mine from the baby car,

which I still think of as yours.
And in the rental, driving home,
what should pop up in the shuffle

of music magically beaming from
my phone through car speakers
but a song about light—

you who signed cards
Love and Light,
Mom—

There it is, moving through
the broken places, reassuring
your baby girl with a shh-shh,

softening edges of empty spaces,
“a moment embracing what time
is erasing, the light.”

•••

Quoted lyrics from “Light,”
a song from “The Book of Rounds” by October Project
Words: Julie Flanders / Music: Emil Adler