Page 88 of Glass Half Full

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I crawl across the blanket

Curl into her side

And reach for her reassurance.

‘Right, Mom? It’s a miracle.’

She does not correct me.

She does not tell me what miracle ‘really’ means.

She brushes my crooked haircut off my face

The one she cut herself with kitchen scissors and a bowl

And says

‘There’s a miracle in every moment we don’t take for granted.’”

I find my mother’s eyes in the crowd. She’s crying, tears streaking down her cheeks as she sits tall and graceful as ever. I let those tears seep into my poem, let them soak my sentences and wash over the crowd when I speak.

“With those words, she puts new lenses on my eyes.

She teaches me that parents are the optometrists

Of the way their children see the world

And suddenly I see them everywhere: the miracles.

The tickle of a ladybug’s feet

As it crawls across my finger

‘It’s a miracle!’

The way twisting one broken bulb

Turns the whole string of Christmas lights back on

‘It’s a miracle!’

The chalk outline my mother traces

Around my shadow on the sidewalk

To leave an image of me standing there

Long after I am gone

‘It’s a miracle!’

I hold my palm in front of my face

In the bathtub one night.

I trace the lines and indents

The ridges and grooves.

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