Mary Christine Delea

​Reunion, Mother and Child
 
after reading interpretations of Paul Simon’s 1972 song,“Mother and Child Reunion”
 
An attempt at suicide. A mother receiving a death notification, Vietnam War era. Incest. The break-up of The Beatles. A song prisoners sing as another is marched to their death penalty punishment. Reincarnation. Foster children being returned to their birth mother. Abortion. A divorced father returning his daughter to her mother after his visitation weekend. A dog killed by a car. A family destroyed by a death.
 
The imagination flings itself in every direction, picturing a wife there and then not. A husband suddenly diseased, then gone. A war taking a son. A guilty person who took the life of someone loved leaving his loved ones behind. The sorrow in that instant. Any family that was one thing and then instantly becoming something else. Everyone pretending the family is still whole, intact.
 
What Simon revealed to be the impetus of his song’s title: a chicken and egg dish at a Chinese restaurant. It’s right there on the menu, just after Dragon and Phoenix but before Happy Family.
 
**
 
Ode to Hacking
 
I. Hack
Yellow cabs melt into a grime where everyone thinks things will wash clean. But the drivers—hacks driving hacks—will never erase from their clothes the fragrance of bus fumes or the dim memory of old horses, too worn for hire, dying in the streets of a cobblestone past. Now, the buildings are measured in terms of output, 
 
II. Hack
which in the suburbs means nice lawns and clean-cut people charging their lawns, but it is the mower that does the work, the actual hacking. Clipping flowers for bouquets does not count. A clip is not a hack, flowers are not kapok trees, and
 
III. Hack
in faraway jungles other tools are needed: a scythe, an axe, a long blade. We like to breathe in the scent of things recently lacerated. We don’t care how they got here. We don’t care what stands in the way of our enjoyment of exotic flower arrangements on our tables, in our windowsills, blocking our views of our neighbours
 
IV. Hack
some of whom sit at computers and turn invisible keys to unlock what is not theirs. At other computers, men write ill-conceived sex scenes from a female point of view. They read these pieces at open mics, making women in the audience who know how their bodies actually work roll their eyes. One is hacking as a hacker. One is a hack. Sometimes, they are the same man. One of them might even be
 
V. Hack
that miserable spouse with the dry cough that never ends. Life would be so perfect if only that cough turned fatal. But. It. Just. Will. Not. Every dry hack grabs another handful of patience from you, and divorce is so ugly and public. Better to keep your troubles inside where bodies can be hacked up, chipped up in the wood chipper, then mixed with mulch and spread on those gorgeous front yard lilies, just one symbol 
 
VI. Hack
of death, that event that signals our bodies have gotten worn out from constant use, like this word: that soft sound like a small laugh, then a hard chop, mimicking the act itself. The bad sex, the transportation, the phlegm, the illegal computer entry, every killer’s sharpness; I resemble the urge, this disease, that horse, those multiple meanings. So do you.

**

In Praise of Poisonous Plants
 
The way poison curls in your lungs by way of cigarettes, warmth filling you for years, tiny highs propping you up twenty times a day. Chances are, you won’t plant tobacco in your yard. But oleander, foxglove, those lovely little lily of the valley flowers you tend so carefully? Deadly. The white baneberry you see as you walk in the woods will kill you, putting your heart down like a cardiac sleeping pill. It’s easy to avoid strychnine trees, every part of which will induce convulsions. The plants that grow on and even near it will assimilate the strychnine: can your trust your knowledge of math and science enough to calculate 
 
how far from a strychnine tree a bush needs to be for its berries to be safe for you? In the neighborhood, the vagaries of wind mixed with a neighbor burning poison ivy, sumac, or oak. The failings of ancestry make some foods deadly—peanut butter, celery, dairy, wine, wheat. 

Nose and throat closing as the elevator traps you with someone scented in rose, geranium, or snapdragon. Those delicate petals, those heart-shaped leaves. 
 
Roots tunneling through the dirt in your yard, the dirt which has spent eons soaking up the deadly detritus of everything from acid rain to zinc phosphide. Plants you never noticed taking it all in. The pretty flowers in your weed-free garden. The trees you lovingly prune. The shrubs with deep, thirsty roots. All of them, full of themselves and so much more, creeping closer to the cracks in your house’s foundation, trying to get to your heart.

**
Birds in the News
            
from the Audubon web site: “Narcissism requires self-awareness, 
which requires some sort of intelligence.”
 
In 2017, a Bush Stone-curlew stared at itself in a window in Brisbane as if staring were its career. Five, seven, nine hours of looking straight ahead, ignoring all else. Few humans have that focus, the willpower to stand still and watch. However, news and memes and Facebook posts claimed the bird a narcissist, in love with its own image. Bird experts disagreed. But humans only understand our own weaknesses. Surely, most of us could stare in the mirror, alternating crying and laughing, for days, given a chair and a bag of chips.
 
There are more chickens than people on Earth, but that’s not news. Even with the smashing slaughter of chicks by the thousands, shooting those deemed not good enough to be killed for food down a compactor, we are still sorely outnumbered. Praise the gods for chicken stupidity, for if they ever rise up, we are doomed.
 
Sometimes humans do get their heads out of the stand long enough to see things fall from the sky, as happened in Utah when a tiny feathered bird of unknown origin, fell on a group of people enjoying the sun with copious amounts of alcohol. Mindful of MADD, the revelers called an Uber to drive them and the sick chick to a nearby animal rescue center. The baby bird was tended to, cured, and named Peter Uber, a funny name for a being with no self-awareness, no human weaknesses, no intelligence the way we understand it. But come migration season, rescuers will set Peter free, when it will migrate by instinct, join others of its kind, leaving us—judgmental and somewhat bird-brained—behind on the ground.
 
**
 
Mary Christine Delea, a native of Long Island, NY, now living in Oregon, is the author of The Skeleton Holding Up the Sky, as well as three chapbooks. Delea has a Ph.D. from the University of North Dakota. She currently does volunteer work for a variety of organizations. Her website is www.mchristinedelea.com and she has a Substack, Peeled Citrus Prompts.