Alexis Sears
After My Mother’s Cancer Returns, I Start Praying Every Night
and God says, “Well, well, well, what have we here? Been ages and you suddenly appear now, kneeling in the dark beside your bed? You’re bored of scrolling through your phone instead?” He isn’t angry, though, merely amused, just the type of humor that I’ve used throughout the years when life got tough, then worse. I’m always looking for Him: in the nurse who eavesdrops when I sashay through the door with gyros, or the blonde who sighs, “What floor?” in the wheezy elevator, wrinkled shirt dotted with mustard. Always on alert, I’m desperate here: could God be in the pony- tailed, slim cashier? In the least phony tone of voice I’ve heard, she says, “You’re young. Don’t worry. 40s are the best.” Among the wheelchairs and the doctors who pass by in the waiting room, a man says, “I won’t lie. If I were you, with everything going on with kids these days, I’d never have them. Spawn of Satan.” That’s not God! But now, I know: I met Him on a flight two years ago. Heading to LAX, I sat with God, a UC Irvine freshman swimmer, wad of gum beneath his seat. I gave up trying to be “lowkey” and I sat, hunch-backed, crying the first time Mom had cancer. As I wept, he laid his hand on mine until I slept. He was gone before I learned his name. But I still hear him asking, all the same, “Is this your bag?” to families in the aisle. The sweat between our palms. His clever smile.
All I’ve Ever Wanted Is to Write
a love poem. Instead, I sit beside the window at a hole-in-the-wall cafe on mornings that are eager to mature into salacious evenings. Overheard: “Is breast milk 1% or 2%?” “OK, I need to wipe my tears and block him!” “He didn’t free the slaves. He wrote the Bible,” then silence I could bottle up and sell. I don’t know why I always feel as if— forget it. Never mind. In the cafe, stiff wooden chairs, espresso-tainted tables. I don’t look the barista in the eye. II. Standing outside the Chestnut Club, the bouncer, Ivan, whom I’m bound to love the way I love the smells of nail polish, vape pens, and Korean BBQ, scrolls through his phone to show me pictures of his wife and newborn while his free hand ushers dance club fiends inside. He slides his phone into his pocket, laughs: “Just write about some made-up dude! Relax!” And suddenly, I feel exposed. I look at him—I really look at him—and want to kiss his puffy cheeks, his baby’s nose. I even want to kiss the bags beneath his young wife’s eyelids, wipe her smeared mascara. I can’t explain it. Surely, it’ll pass. III. The moon, once swollen, fades, and tires screech the way they’re known to do. A woman groans, then pukes all over her velvet dress. She asks her friend, “Why do you still put up with me?” What is a love poem, anyway? She looks over her shoulder back at me, her smile so faint that still, I wonder if I imagined it.
Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022. Her work appears in Best American Poetry, Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, West Branch, Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Rattle, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Editor-at-Large of the Northwest Review and Contributing Editor of Literary Matters, she lives in Los Angeles.