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| Candice Louisa Daquin |
Our mother is concerned
After
Robert Maddox-Harle
You have stayed out late again, light in the streets
your only route home, they dim and sputter with a
ransacking irregularity, like a heart beating beneath
wood. You didn’t attend the funeral, there in the
uncluttered
part of your soul —you
remained behind as we
gathered all our black clothes and tutting at their
fading, ran for the car on thin heals. Rain blocked
all sound
that day —the
same day you turned from the window like
a flower angled out of light, dropping your folded
arms
into space, into a room of your own, nobody could ever
enter.
I sit by your bed, fidgeting with the loose hems of
your blanket
familiar and all strange; your mouth is loose and
silent, your
long pianist fingers rest atop the sheet, like gentle
brail. I read
our favorite children’s books aloud —my voice cracking with disuse
and tears. There is a jar of old flowers, dried by the
sun, that sit
in a simple poise on the window sill. I think if you
could; you’d
ask me not to disturb them, even if our mother wants
to
claim this space and clean it of its mote and its
memories.
I will not let anyone in —this
will be our time. perhaps in a month
or two, the clock will start ticking again —and you, tired of
death, will shrug it off and open the piano.
***
The faraway claimed world
Evaporate plays on the brown lines of your skin
where birds challenge balance and crowd budding trees
I think of you. The way you combed your hair erratically
leaving curls in every direction, how soft the tips of
your
fingers, when I brought them to my mouth. There is a
quietude
in loss —terrifying
and opiate like. I have sat in the same position
for the whole day, unable to think of one thing to
say. Your
shadow passes the dining room, crosses past the old
mirror
in the landing and flickers with daylight up the
stairs. I long
more than once —and
less than twenty times, to follow you —
to discover you lying on our bed, smiling that secret
smile you
know entranced me. The contrast of your skin against
white sheets
your smell enveloping me. I want to turn around and
not see
shadows from the corner of my eyes, but the wholeness
of you
never broken —never
lost, reclaiming your place. It is midday now
and the light has changed; casting latticed strips of
blue and purple
on our walls. I say our, but they are only mine
now. Your mother is
concerned —I
don’t return her calls. The pen you used to write something
the last day of your life; sits atop a stack of
letters, neither of us wrote.
I can taste ink in my mouth, the flowers keep being
sent —
one day they will need burying too, along with my
sense of
safety. A kingfisher swipes a small fish from the pond
and
as it lifts out —wet
and shining, the fish spasms in a last vain
attempt, to free itself.
***
The insidious mastery of grief
In the unfolding world of your mouth
Asian lilies bloom their heady perfume —rogue
with wild. It has been 1245 hours since you died
the sun stubbornly shone, despite you being put
in a box under earth. My hair is short now; entirely
unlike
the me you knew. I have cast off the compunction to
exist
beneath your gaze. It rains like a mirror into another
universe
catapulting me back to afternoons I lay under you —listening
to the catch in your chest turn and wind. Our ghost
steps
from an over-hot bath, her ebony skin releasing steam
like a
hot-house plant. Even though I cannot see her face, I
know she
is smiling in the luxuriate of solitude. Fast-forward
and nobody
smiles at being alone. We gather balls of yarn and
attach them
to people when they’re not looking. Kites as bright as
your eyes
were once, fill skies with lament until unseasonable
rain
pulls them downward, plummeting wet red birds to
reaching
hands. You filled our walls with art —I removed all of it, save one
painting of you as a child. like a photograph, you are
watching
something out of view, as if your life depended upon
it. I see
the clutch of your little fist, how your thick hair
fell over your
shoulders in much the same way. Micro-aggressions
flicker
at the corner of your eyes and mine. I am older now
and years fall heavily with a patchouli sorrow, stirring
through
the deep coffee mines of your pupils —trying to adjust to the dark.
Bio: Of Egyptian/French heritage, Candice Louisa
Daquin is an immigrant working as a Psychotherapist in America. She is also Associate
Editor for Raw Earth Ink and Queer Ink and Poetry Editor with Parcham Literary
Magazine and Tint Journal. She co-edited the award-winning anthologies; The
Kali Project and SMITTEN. Daquin’s last collection of poetry was Tainted
by the Same Counterfeit. Her debut novel, The Cruelty, comes out fall,
2025, published by FlowerSong Press.
