Omelet & Her 77th

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Michelle McMillan-Holifield

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Omelet

We broke eggs
sloppily over 
a Corelle cup,
that little 1977
goblet whose greens
weren’t leaves
but a census
of mossy splotches, 
whose pattern 
of small yolk-yellow 
flowers was as familiar 
and delicious 
a memory as the zing
of mustard greens
in a grandmother’s
sweltering kitchen—
her love village
where she prayed
for her salvation
where she prayed
for her babies
where she prayed
for her country—
and we sloped 
the eggs, peppered
and seasoned together
into the skillet
so succinctly
you would never know
they were once 
two wholly distinct bodies. 
Together we divide 
eggs onto plates 
as if feeding thousands
with a few fish
and few loaves.

__________

Her Seventy-Seventh

My mother held the bathroom door for me while my husband ordered us hamburgers and Frosties. The door’s mood was part disaster, less door, more unquiet housekey. She stood before it—stoic bouncer—yet so frail after lugging my father through his heavy death. She thought nothing of her shrinking frame, only of protecting. Later, I turned my head from her at the table, eyelashes blooming freshly wet. For years we were cannons and barricades, all grimaced syntax and gun metal gray. On her 77^th birthday, my mother became flawless to me. Loyal. Royal. Redwood. Mountain. Bourbon on the rocks. She bosses me around (while I’m performing the task already), and I no longer balk. I take selfies of the two of us, retake them when she doesn’t smile. I am a shack to her fortress. I am the cloudburst to her sheets of rain. I am the flawed, melancholic heir to her throne.

__________

Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. She pens poetry, book reviews, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her work has been included in or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Sky Island Journal, Stirring, The Collagist, The Main Street Rag, Whale Road Review, and Windhover, among others. She hopes you one day find her poetry tacked to a tree somewhere in the Alaskan Wild.

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