The violets that remind you of your dear
great grandmother’s dining room
on Oakdale Avenue
African violets in purple, lilac, lavender, and pink on a plant stand in front of a draped window near the olive green rotary telephone on the wall
The Violets that remind you of your first, truest love’s breath
Lavender-perfumed chalky candy squares,
Choward’s Mints in dark purple foil sleeves
from the corner store
/
But you were not one of their truest loves
no.
//
the once-loving matriarch forgot you when the child stolen from El Salvador arrived/
a baby smuggled across nations!
yet, this was not a rescue mission for an orphan, no, this boy had a living mami / instead, it was a long distance shopping trip for a wom[b][an] whose insides were spoiled by lust and greed.
For one, who coveted, but then drowned in the role of motherhood
yet she still swam deep in men,
and floated in luxurious possessions, everything, everyone, an acquisition to her
The woman unbecame your Great Grammaw and became the boy’s “Mimi” – solely and wholly his // later, she accused you of lifting $20 from her purse when you ran away from home at fourteen and snuck into her house to simply rest and pee — she had given you a key!
She accused you of this – of theft!
even after her own daughter poached a child from a sovereign state, had kited checks, had pawned stolen jewelry and defrauded the chicago public housing authority /
this Mimi was silent, or complicit, in all those crimes and lies/
I have never stolen a coin or a child – or a permanent part of anyone’s heart
in 1999,
you still went to her home, anointed her hands and face with oil and tenderness,
preparing her living body for the
grave,
while telling her you loved her so much, truthfully.
You went because you knew
Instinctively
that she was dying – alone – in her very own house with the stolen boy and his imitation of a mother / and her imitation of a daughter
Her violets were wilting fast — thirsty and unpruned from the neglect of her intentionally chosen beloveds and heirs, who owned both her home and her heart / she, foreseeing her own ghostly humiliation and shame before the mortician’s eyes
She died the very next day.
///
The Violets that remind you of Him,
of your first love,
of his breath and kisses in a dark gangway or anywhere hidden
that sweet ingredient imbued in the deep amalgam of his scent
a pheromonic candy –
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 