She lets me kiss her on the temple and says: “You got some packages”—books still sent to their address, my packages from presses still come here, because living away from home, I’ve never had a doorman or a package room.

We go sit in the kitchen. Boiled vegetables and buffalo mozzarella for my father and me, my mother’s already had some: we only manage to eat with her on important occasions—she’s always “already eaten”—eating is shameful for her, like in that Buñuel movie where people have their meals hiding in the bathroom. She’s standing, tailbone against the counter, back to the window.

To write about my mother, I take ten drops of benzodiazepine in water—it’s the first time I’ve ever dared to write about her.

I’ve never described her, not here, not in any of my poems. She’s a tall woman, just under five foot ten, with my same build, a bit overweight, like me. Strong shoulders, strong legs, a belly, a proud expression: evasive, amazed, superior, sidelong. She has a messy pageboy cut. I don’t think she’s ever spent more than ten seconds brushing her hair, including when she was a girl: I don’t know if this is true, but my instinct says yes.

Once, seeing her on the sidewalk after Mass walking toward us, Barbara summed her up: “Here comes your mother—look how cute—a fur coat and a headband.” No one had ever summed up my mother, or helped me to understand her. An extremely intelligent child who has refused to become an adult, who only pretends to be a lady when she talks to electricians and plumbers, and only truly seems like an adult when she’s reflecting on religion and theology, which she studied in college after age fifty. She wears dark blue or turquoise flats, or moccasins. For a party, a ceremony: fine, loose-fitting slacks. In the winter she goes to church wearing a cape that billows as she walks. At home, her sweaters still smell like Mommy.

I remember her stretched out for hours on the living room couch surrounded by journals, books, plates with bits of cake, all lying on a bright tomato-red, black, and ocher rug. I was a teenager.

She had a benign tumor, has done postural gymnastics, sometimes walks with a limp. She’s basically healthy, except for one real problem: phlegmons, abscesses that emerge in places I can’t see, around her stomach, I think. Every time I ask her about her health she answers: “Oh, everything’s fine, just those phlegmons…” We’ve never tied them to any particular illness, so they feel more symbolic, a memento that ills do exist. “You wouldn’t believe how disgusting they are…”

She has a flawless complexion, and a weak chin like her mother and first grandchild. She loves wearing pearls, but she isn’t the least bit vain, except when it comes to bragging about her sons.