Elissa Calamia

Uncle Bobby in a Hospital Bed with Pneumonia and Barely Breathing

He doesn’t look good, says Joy.
I want to cry, right here in this karaoke bar with UT playing Notre Dame on TV 
and the lady in the green dress singing 
Katy Perry, and all the people out there who are so 
far, far away, 
floating like balloons,
lives let go on a string up towards dust or heaven,
holding onto a breeze weightless and carried
the way we’re all supposed to be when you close your eyes and think about it 

And I know the full crushing rock-laden 
weight of your life 
will peel off like a shell, 
your armor left like a giant insect
on a couch in Amityville, New York

And your son will greet you, he’s been gone a long time now,  
and your mother will greet you, your mother
who used to hold me when I was too young to remember,
sing me lullabies in Italian, rocking me, like the rocking motion of the ships of the boats that brought them here, rocking the empty space that held her other, 
wished-for life 

There was no hope for our grandmothers, 
they went back to their families in Italy, 
or Ireland, or Russia, 
but there was no home for them left
and so they came back to their husbands in America to live silent lives, 
in house dresses and stockings, to rock their babies, 
and their babies’ babies

Through the knots in their hands and the fresh smelling dirt baked into wrinkles and skin
they gave us their lives, 
ripe and plump from a seed.
With the weight of their hands and their backs and their heavy, tired hearts, 
they died too young, from 
cancer and tumors and heart attacks 

and through the lumps in their breasts we grew backs, we got wings. 
We rose up like baby birds with knocked knees and wings the size of giant moths, we ran to the ends of our Mother-May-I streets and at the corner light jumped and took off, birds of flight, mid-air wings at my back, the sky rising and rising…