(PROSE POEM)
IF I MET MY MOTHER NOW, WOULD WE BE FRIENDS?
BF MCCUNE
IF I MET MY MOTHER NOW, WOULD WE BE FRIENDS?
BF MCCUNE
Like me she wrote poetry, sappy sonnets, about love and spring. She sported a nose like mine and big brown eyes. Like me she was judgmental to the extreme . . . even on her deathbed, captured in the thrall of childbirth gone wrong, she refused to absolve her mother’s abandonment. Yet she passed the abandonment down. Because my mother wafted away like a breath of air, vanished suddenly when I was near infancy, no explanations have mattered since then. Before I could even say the words or understand how or why, she disappeared, leaving me deprived, speechless. My sister says because I lost my mother at age two, I’ll always be searching for people who now are gone. Frantic to find them. Missing friends, dead lovers, lost relatives, absent from neglect or time or death, who haunt my days and nights. Those who have deserted me. I like to think my mother and I could have shared a giggle at human absurdity, a burgeoning joy at a dew-soaked sunrise, a tear at a sad movie. But we never will. She’s always the silent stalker in the corner of my eye, the shadow over a scene. A pain clings to me like a burr. I can’t measure what’s missing, forever seeking what I’ll never find.
At age 10 the Saturday Evening Post rejected BF McCune's poetry, but her interest in writing led to a looong career in public relations nonprofits while she also freelanced articles and stories. Her other credits include 2nd prize, national 2012 Tom Howard Short Story Contest, and Honorable mention, Best Short Stories Sat Eve Post Fiction Contest 2013.
