Susan Mason Scott

 

 

Champion

Mud Daubers paralyze black widows to feed their young.

Messy, thready, twisted, awry—

the web strands.

The neighbor attacks vultures with a hose.

I snarl – “everyone’s hungry” – saccharine,

the Mother’s salty.

My mother admonished every time I slit silk with my tongue whet.

My mother’s dead. I wanted a champion.

The stranger in a rickety lawn chair, middle of a narrow road, attends five newborns

attempting to suckle a dead opossum:

stranded, ladder, backbone—it’s DNA—uncoiled

those newborns had a champion.

My subconscious, a murky trap—failures, impulsivities, inactions, indiscretions—harrows

where the sharpest fault lies—

A thirty-one-year-old drunk woman

struck my nineteen-year-old son 0.27 in her blood

entangled DNA bonds—

my son’s dead.

A Samaritan, a mother, saved his blood-

stained blanket for me what survives

his DNA, 32 this year

I have ceased to mutter she killed him.