And that’s the other thing about my mother,
she won’t tell me that she’s sick unless she has a story
about the nurse who took her blood pressure
in the emergency room.
I know that so much of her leaked into me but, God,
how I yearn to burden my friends at all hours of the night
with my musings on Didion, on modern slang like ‘menty b’,
on the crunch of cicada shells on my lunchtime walk.
This is the life I have found via the breadcrumbs left behind
and I want them all to know that, to me,
they are home and there is always a light on in this front room.
schedule this message to send at 3am
Amy Devine is an artist from a lineage of artists whose work has been featured in several publications including The Antigonish Review, flashglass, and Beyond the Veil Press. Her first book Speaking of Bees was published by Harvard Square Press in 2025.