poem for a long lost friend, a poem

ms. emma’s mouth wrapped her face like a belt/ and stuck near her ear like an eye/because that’s what strokes do/they steal your face/ no pretty woman standing in the close aisles of the supermarket/no perfect fingers to fry the chicken once it’s home/the limp didn’t bother her as much as the wrath let loose on her face/ and it weighed on her like a sack of brown-skinned potatoes/ like the last piece of food in the house for weeks/she used to be a big-breasted bare-legged something/ with nail-straight hair six kids no husband a nice hook but always made her rent/ who cares they ate oatmeal six mornings a week because Sunday morning is when she threw up her whole stomach/ and hangovers just wouldn’t allow a seventh day of the very same things/she used to be able to approve and deny any broad-shouldered hairy-chested suitor/ lavish or not/ because she was young enough, dumb enough, yellow enough/ and she still pretty pretty as sunshine/her mother didn’t have alzheimer’s then/and her father hadn’t been dead some 35 (45) years/ say the dogs got him/ she hadn’t been telling lies then either/ I’m going on. Going on just the same/now a rag and a mouth wrapped around her head/ slick silver fibers broke her scalp/ and she’d be lucky if her third son called her twice before the 4th of July/ she just couldn’t believe where time had brought her/ with a lop-sided face and knees that knocked when she carried her money to the altar/the same knees that went loop dee loop as she blessed the very god who cursed her/ she wanted her face, wanted her mouth to be a picture with a dazzling audience/but she had two too great burdens to bear/ so she fixed a potion and plate/found herself a pillow/sank into her Elizabethan/and wept