Wild Geese — hooligan mag

by Jo Blair Cipriano

She asked for silence. We play the music she didn’t want.
Eva Cassidy sings while a metal lung
exhales in a room down the hall. I follow its veins
across doghaired carpet between wooden legs the chair now
an impossible summit. This has happened too fast.
She asked for silence but we’re not ready so we play
music and my mother climbs into the bed cradles
her face. Someone reads a poem. What cannot be prolonged
we prolong. For a moment she allows it. Inevitably,
silence comes. Then goes. A flock of geese fly
across the dark. Then go. There is no soft fucking
animal in my body. I love the woman who is dying. She exhales
and does not ask for more. In this vacuum Mama and I are left
alive. We hear what we cannot see. We turn
off the machines. We carry her body
across every threshold feet first.

Jo Blair Cipriano is from Hyattsville, Maryland. They are the 2023 winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and have received support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Brooklyn Poets. A former college dropout, Jo is now an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona, where they are a 2023 Southwest Field Studies in Writing fellow.