Before I changed my mother

for the first time

she asked me to call the pharmacy

thinking the woman

always dressed in the store’s dark

blue could come spare us.

I said: Ma we knew this was coming.

Then call Kim, she says,

but her friend Kim is wearing

an apron and walking circles

in a restaurant with a coffee pot

and won’t be able to help

with the necessaries.

Kim is all of us—

living with our own concerns,

conquered by adulthood,

love playing the part

of a winter coat lost

in the immensity. Kim

and the woman who puts

the pills in the bottle,

and all my old high-school

friends working, unable to stay

late around the bonfire. The nurses

had schedules and uniforms.

My mother’s bed was in the center

of the living room. Her morphine,

a viscous blue liquid I dropped

on her tongue. In the evenings,

Billie Holiday eased herself

out of the speakers and then sat

her voice down quietly

in the lamplight. I wanted

the nurses, regardless

of gender or age, to hold me

in the dark, to lie with me

on a bed of forgetfulness.

Many of them said:

It’s okay. She did it for you,

now you can return the favor.

It’s the same. But one nurse said:

It is not the same.