Ani Martin
Missing Mother
I sat at my kitchen desk
searching for summer camps
when the alert caught my eye—
local potter lost. Missing mother.
I searched on Instagram and found her.
Clover face, dark brown hair—she looked familiar.
A line of sweetly dressed children, then a scroll
of these small, handmade vases holding a single nasturtium
or twig of ceanothus.
A neighbor told me more—
one day the mother heard a voice.
Loud. Pressing at the insides of her skull
following her from room to room.
No one believed her!
Like any mother
I’m sure that she tried to hold on;
I’m sure she adored her children,
watching their kaleidoscope faces.
Get down, go!
Leave it—the house, the children.
Look away from the terror
on your husband’s face, pull yourself
like petals from a flower.
Leave!
A few days later they found her
in a completely different neighborhood,
sitting on a curb under a eucalyptus tree
saying she was not the potter,
or the missing mother.
And it wasn’t like
her family could just retrieve her like a pet
or grandparent with dementia
and put her back into
one of the thousands of days
she’s lived alert to the needs and rhythms of others. No.
She’s locked away in a facility now
with a head as empty
as a ransacked catacomb
and a mind wandering loose and wild
with nowhere to go and no one
she has to be.
