Pamela Murray Winters

I Object

I’ve become my mother, my grandmother.
I dodder, outpaced. AARP texts me. I can’t even,
as the kids used to say, five decades ago.
Hard boxes under my thin-skinned fingers.
Concepts for which I can’t find words.
Maybe I walked the wrong way as the world turned.

When my love is away, am I alone?
I ask the Object for music.
Alexa, play WTMD. Then
Alexa, raise volume.

I wash the dishes before they go in the dishwasher.

Neil Young’s a whiner for his heart of gold,
gettin’ old. I yell You’re twenty-four.
The Object knows I’m not talking to it.
The Object knows its name.

The Object’s world strips away articles,
courtesy. I want my mother,
born in the year of the vibraphone and the pop-up toaster,
to loom back from the grave and guide us.
Pam, what do you say? Thank you, Alexa.
Alexa, what do you say?

Copyright © Pamela Murray Winters 2018

Pamela Murray Winters’ poems and essays have appeared in Gargoyle, Opossum, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, and numerous other publications, and her first full-length collection of poems, The Unbeckonable Bird, is being published by FutureCycle Press in summer 2018. Pam received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in poetry in 2017. She has an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she helps organize poetry events in and around Maryland, including the monthly Evil Grin Poetry Series in Annapolis.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review