when mama made herself a cardboard suit Frankie McMillan
... and said she was going for a long walk in the forest, and I followed...
hiding behind one tree, then another, when I heard her, the cardboard
flapping, her muttered breath, when she stopped in a clearing and pulled
out a smoke, her arm resting on her stiff cardboard
legs, when I wanted to sit beside her, picking at the corrugated folds of
her knees, when every anniversary something would happen — when she
swam far out to sea and we lost sight of her, when one Christmas
no one could get near her, when she began collecting cardboard
boxes from the supermarket, from the backs of refrigerator warehouses,
when she began cutting and stapling cardboard until the kitchen was piled
high, when she stopped talking, when her voice became papery thin, when
she pinned a photo of my dead brother on her cardboard suit, was
when she walked out of the house and into the company of trees, that
didn't ask anything of her but just kept giving the way trees do.
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