~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Tom Holmes

I Don’t Remember All of It

                   with a sentence from Daniele Pantano

I.

The long-awaited lightning

storm arrives in a pour

at the end of the road

an ice cream truck’s bells

chime, “Silent Night, Holy

Night.” The temperature drops

over all of it

the wind blows in

I don’t know you.

II.

When I write my birth

mother a letter, she responds

I don’t know you.

I don’t remember

all of it or I stopped being

attentive to the rest of it.

III.

All I know is I don’t know

you is my mother tongue.

IV.

The prettiest girl

in school replies,

I don’t know you.

V.

The mother tongue.

You Turn Around

She visits in the obscurest hour—

the head of your birth mother

whom you’ve never known

with a finger across her lips. 

There’s a long queue

of empty bourbon bottles

and sharpened knives

that lead to a psych ward

where everyone has a mother

issue and plays checkers.

You can see fire in a doctor’s

head mirror. The bathrooms

flame. Your blood circulates

faster. You hear your mother

briefly whisper like a gasp

from a recently severed head.

You turn around.

For over twenty years, Tom Holmes is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. Holmes is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of Incurable Dreams (Xavier Review Press, 2023) and The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. He teaches at Nashville State Community College (Clarksville).

Follow him on Twitter: @TheLineBreakholmes_thomas_g@yahoo.com