Alzheimer’s                                                        

It’s just that when I walk through a door,
A different person walks out the other side.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, oh, where
Are all my children now? Pease porridge cold,
See me hobble along the floor, eighty-nine
Years old?  Or sit patient at my bedside,
Waiting for my John, and when I complain
My son whispers in my ear, He’s gone.
Was he your father then, that handsome man?
Mother, sister, daughter—which one are you?
Diddle, diddle dumpling, the moon fell down
So long ago—what’s there for me to do?
And how did I tumble through dream like this,
From youth’s whirl to dementia’s numbing kiss?

Reverse Cheating

At 89 my mother likes to play
gin rummy: loves cards ordered in her hand,
jacks, kings, bouquets of hearts splayed
across the table, though she blurts offhand
each time, How do I pick up the pile?—
rules once automatic as nursery rhyme
erased by time’s inexorable wheel.
When she can’t match cards, her face darkens,
arthritic hands clench, eyes blink desperation . . .
until I ignore the discarded ten
I need for three of a kind, plunk the queen
she needs for a winning five-card run
on top of the pile. Is it pride or shame
to let your mother best you at her game?

My Mother Said

One of these days, my legs just won’t go,
and she was right:
in a nursing home, wheelchairs in a row,
one morning her legs refused to go─
How dare they! Diminuendo
when what she’d prayed for was flight.
One of these days my legs won’t go,
my mother said, and she was right.

I’ll wake up and not know who I am,
my mother said, but she was wrong─
she knew who she was but not who to blame
for waking up knowing I am still Elaine,
the same and yet not the woman
she used to be: clever, agile, headstrong.
She woke up knowing Yes, I am,
wishing she was wrong.

Suellen Wedmore, Poet Laureate emerita for the small seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, has been widely published. She has been awarded first place in the Writer’s Digest’s Rhyming Poem Contest and, most recently, in the digest’s Non-Rhyming Poems contest. Her chapbook Deployed won the Grayson Press annual contest, her chapbook On Marriage and Other Parallel Universes was published by Finishing Line Press, and her chapbook Mind the Light won a first place in the QuillsEdge Press “Women on the Edge” contest. In 2014 she won first place in the Studios of Key West Contest, and three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She graduated from the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College in 2004.

Header image by Josh Appel via Unsplash