Salvation: Death Is Just Another Word for It.

Salvation: Death Is Just Another Word For It
By Mushroom Montoya

Doom cast its heavy net,
Shrouding winter in mournfulness.
Death slunk in and snatched two uncles
And then crushed my grandmother’s heart
So hard it stopped, forever.

 I stood in a foot of snow,
Wearing my sandals
In stockinged feet,
Watching the third coffin descend.

“That’s my salvation,
Death is just another word for it,”
Said my mother,

A skeleton tightly wrapped
In lost wishes for a full recovery,
And in skin whose tenderness got bleached out
By her ever-present cancer.

She winked at me
with an impish smile,
Wishing she had the strength
to play.

She tried when we arrived home.
We pulled out our tongues of fire.
But hers fizzled out too soon
Giving me the unfair advantage
Of strength and youth.

I returned home to Albuquerque
Failing to imagine her
Not skinny,
not almost dead.

Death’s eye was watching me too
When I left work
To go home the following day.

The light turned green
I drove My motorcycle
Into the red light runner’s car,
Speeding through the intersection

Just in time
For me to collide,
Fly,
And break pieces of my body
On the hard, black, gritty asphalt.

This was not my salvation.
Death was not the word.

Although the thought crossed my mind

As I flew upside down.

I lay on the couch,
Listening to Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
Recuperating,
While my mother was dying
800 miles away,

Hoping her salvation
Would come 
While she was still at home
And not in a hospital bed.

My mother would’ve washed out my mouth
With soap
If I had used the naughty words
In Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The phone rang,
“Mom’s in the hospital
She won’t last two weeks.”
She won’t have her salvation at home.

I stood in front of her coffin
Wearing my well-worn sandals
Holding a brush and some paint
To create a butterfly

A graphic representation
Of her Death
Of her salvation.

I left her grave wondering
If she had ever read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.