Two Poems: Carrie Shipers
my Mom’s death with revision My mother chose to die because she was tired and in pain. For months she’d heard my dad’s voice calling her name, so when she felt infection building in her blood, she’d chosen to wait and let it take her. That was my first draft. In the second draft, my mom was doing laundry when she died, and her last load—the one she washed but didn’t dry—included the blue-and-white polo shirt she’d worn to Dad’s deathbed five years before. Every time I saw her wearing it—and sometimes when I didn’t— she mentioned how the shirt made him feel close. In the third draft, I’m not sure if my mom was doing laundry out of habit or boredom, or if her death was unexpected after all and happened to arrive while she was doing chores. In the fourth draft, I feel compelled to clarify she didn’t die at home. A friend found her collapsed on the back porch and she lived one more day but was never awake. In the fifth draft, I gathered sour clothes from her washer but left the polo shirt to wash again with the outfit