Poetry- Honorable Mention

1.
This morning I drove my mother-in-law to the doctor.
She told me, slow down, not so fast, she needed more time to think
things through—It’s been a long time since
I’ve been on a job interview.
When we walked through the door, she whispered,
Where are the typewriters?

2.
Last night I watched Alfred Hitchcock
being interviewed on an old Dick Cavett rerun.
Heavy lidded eyes, pouty lower lip, avuncular belly
on which his meaty hands lay knotted like a bow—
Mr. Hitchcock’s wit as delightfully dry as a cool desert night,
Dick’s boyish hesitancies and self-aggrandizing puns
as irritating now as they were back then when
I, too, had hair to spare.
I felt that increasingly familiar Leave It to Beaver itch,
a dislocation of time in space,
not nostalgia, but slippage,
a matter of degree.

3.
Upon returning to the nursing home,
my mother-in-law tugged at my arm and said,
I’m glad I didn’t get the job.
I like working here—
I hope they didn’t hire someone else
while I was gone.

4.
One time, while sitting with my mother-in-law
in the nursing home dining room, she said,
These people would rather fall out of their chair
than make any sense.

Sitting at my kitchen table I think,
Tomorrow morning, like this morning,
I will have blueberries and bran flakes.
Or will it be bran flakes and blueberries?

5.
(Note to self [1]: Language becomes meaninglessly interrogative
before becoming refreshingly declarative with age.)

6.
(Note to self [2]: On my next visit I must remember to tell her
I like working here, too.)

Robert Nordstrom is a poet living in Mukwonago, Wisconsin. He has published fiction, poetry and essays in various literary magazines, including, among others, Verse Wisconsin, Rosebud, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Main Street Rag, and Upstreet (forthcoming).