Freezer

by Sharon Olds


When I think of people who kill and eat people,
I think of how lonely my mother was.
She would come to me for comfort, in the night,
she'd lie down on me and pray. And I could say
she fattened me, until it was time
to cook me, but she did not know,
she'd been robbed of a moral sense that way.
How soft she was, how unearthly her beauty, how
terrestrial the weight of her flesh
on the constellation of my joints and pouting
points. I like to have in the apartment,
shut in a drawer, in another room,
the magazine with the murder-cannibal,
it comforts me that the story is available
at any moment, accounted for, not
dangerously unthought of. I think he kept
ankles in the freezer. My mother was such a good kisser.
From where I sat in the tub, her body,
between her legs, looked a little
like a mouth, a youthfully bearded mouth
with blood on it. From one hour to the next on earth
no one knew what would happen.


source: Pascal