JACKLEEN HOLTON
INTERVENTION
My mother’s thwarted our plan,
absconded from the hospital, hitched
a ride back to the house
she can’t live in anymore. I tear across the desert,
the yellow speeding ticket
I got outside Yuma flapping
in the cool wind that smells of clean sheets
on the line. The Saguaros begin in tandem
with the raindrops. I’m not as broken
as I’ve been the other times I’ve made this drive.
In a few hours, we’ll stand in a semicircle
in her living room
because there’s no place to sit among the collections
of angels, stacks of newspaper and dust.
And we’ll take turns
telling her why she has to go to St. Mark’s now,
that she needs help. The list of her ailments
is long. I won’t recite them here.
But I’ll tell you about the yellow cactus flowers
in her overgrown front yard, and the tender way
her brother kneels in her yard to pull
the weeds away from the pansies, while we make
our heartfelt pleas, how the sky breaks
into violet shards like the carnival
glass vase my grandmother bought at a roadside
antique shop outside San Antonio.
And yes, I was whipped
for dropping it, but that’s an old wound,
and there are older ones underneath it.
The family that nearly perished
in a house fire in 1957 is breathing now,
the charged air of a summer lightning storm.
I could tell you we all have the same disease,
how we can’t let go of the old junk, but I’d rather say:
these purpling clouds, the cold, clean
forgiveness of a hard rain.
Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Dogwood, Poet Lore, Rattle, RHINO Poetry, Salamander, and others.