Delivery Poem by Jean Marie Ruiz

My mother loved tulips.
In December her body waits
in a mortuary with
liver-rotted men and their cholo sons
laid out for burial
in lipstick-stained dress shirts.
By January she will be in an urn
unsuitable for display
packed into a box
wrapped in white paper
handed to me like a gift.

Two days after my mother dies,
a dozen dark pink roses arrive
from my mother's sister,
the one who didn't get there in time
to see her before she died,
who asked my cousin
to give my mother's hand
one last squeeze.
The roses should be from a suitor,
but after my father left
she decided never to fall in love again.
Instead she ironed my gym clothes,
drove me to riding lessons,
kept bottles of rum
on the kitchen counter.

I think of my grandmother working at Podesta's
in San Francisco before I was born.
A man came in and asked for a dozen roses,
then pulled a gun and demanded all the cash.
As he left the store, my grandmother asked,
"Don't you want your roses? "

There are stories
I don't want to remember.
How the morphine turned my mother
back into the woman
who slept so heavily
on Saturday afternoons.
How she stopped breathing
without us noticing.
How the room became
nothing but winter branches
and an absence of prayer.