for Joe Skerrett
His voice was smooth jazz
Swirling in the air.
He leaned back on his chair,
Hands resting on his big chest,
As we discussed Morrison’s Beloved.
A book about love, motherly love.
Real thick and heavy, the syrupy
Kind that sticks to your fingers,
Hands, and soul.
The question was simple:
How do you put a limit on the love a mother
Has for her children? And I wept
Like a child because I was that child:
In the dark without a mother’s voice
Singing him to bed.
My mother left this world and
Part of me had gone with her.
We became ghosts to each other.
She seeps into my poems and takes over the writing.
I do what any adoring child does:
I let my mother haunt me.
Beloved
Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel, And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (Yes Poetry). His prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Lowell Review, Massachusetts Review, The American Journal of Poetry, carte blanche, Diode Poetry Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Consequence, among others. He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, NY.