The Service Elevator

“I cannot do it.”, says my mother.
“Sure, you can. Either way
we’ll angle the baby out.”, the nurse says,
and the hallucinogens injected pave
A 60s-green plastic-painted corridor.
My mother waddles toward a door, ajar,
at the end, and on the other side
she sees her mother bleeding out her cancer.
My mother feels she’ll birth a girl.
The service elevator, out-of-order, sits
like a praying mantis in the dim shaft.
Outside, April decontaminates the streets;
the moody rain taps the last of the cobblestones;
my father’s umbrella guards his anxiety.
Nothing happens. Nothing happens often,
and isn’t that something?
I see the stars whoosh past me as I descend.
The path will not remain in the memory.
My mother will die forty-three summers later.
The river will recede to reveal its bed, unkempt,
hidden from the visitors, always has kept
the bundles of letters and…