Even in places she had never been, my mother 
now is, once was, will be. An absence & 

an everywhere, a before & an after, my trickster 
mother, a shape ever shifting. Three months dead 

& she comes up with the sun over the ridge, 
scattering into scraps of cloud 

petal pink. They float along light 
like those little circles of cereal sweet 

in my childhood’s breakfast bowl. 
Mother nearby at a sink full of soap suds 

or packing the lunch boxes for school. 
I would spoon every last soggy bit 

into my mouth, wipe my chin, then drink, 
drink all the sugared milk down. 

Robin Turner’s

poems, prose poems, and flash fiction have most recently appeared in Rattle, The Texas Observer, Rust + Moth, and Bracken Magazine, as well as in Haunted, a Porkbelly Press anthology. She lives in North Texas where she works with teen writers online and serves on the editorial staff for Sugared Water.