Washing Her Body
After Joy Harjo

I was supposed to help my mother
shower the day she had her strokes.
She was supposed to thread her fingers
through my hair and tell me I was getting soaked.

She is healthy when I wash her.
Her skin is not the color of a pale harvest moon,
liver not yet home to the cancer that would kill her —
she is as beautiful as she ever was, though she never believed
it. The water is warm and it fills the old
white, clawfoot tub of our second home
that was too small, but my mother does the best she can.
The water is a pale shade of blue,
scented with Dr. Teal’s eucalyptus bath salts,
two bath oil beads broken under the spout
while she undresses — I was never ashamed of my mother’s body.
The scar from her gallbladder surgery is large, mars
her pale, freckled skin from seratus anterior to external abdominal

oblique. She tells me again her surgeon was nicknamed “The Butcher.”
I take my time washing her back,
the need to memorize the placement
of freckles, moles, strawberry marks —
I should map them in the stars,
even after her body will find home in earth.

The plastic cup dips into the water,
the same cup she used to rinse me
off with when I was a child in the same tub.
We sing and run more hot water
into the cooling tub. If it is winter
and the old pipes are frozen, I will heat water on the stove
again and pour it in at her feet when it begins to steam —
she will be warm again.

I should let her memory go here, should
let my guilt drain with the bathwater. But
my guilt clings to me like dried oil paint,
it will require multiple baths before
I can let her go.

Carrie Elizabeth Penrod received her MFA in creative writing from Mississippi University for Women. She works at a small town paper in Indiana where she resides with her two fat cats. Her work has been published in Prometheus Dreaming, Button Poetry’s Instagram, Anti-Heroin Chic, Rough Diamond Poetry, Papeachu Press, and corn stalks.