She’s twelve now, makes her own breakfast.
This morning, a plain bagel with blueberry
cream cheese. She leaves a speckled mess
on the kitchen counter. When I ask, “Have
you brushed your teeth? Put on deodorant?”
she rolls her eyes, stares at the TV, muted,
while the local weatherman waves a hand
over a map of the southeast. She’s too old,
she thinks, for these incursions, and maybe
she is. Maybe we’re just ceremonial now,
decorative. I make her lunch and she kisses
me goodbye. Later K. stirs and gets a coffee.
I watch her go about her morning choreography.
I cut in and we talk a while, plan, bicker, laugh,
then take our places, not quite at arm’s reach,
but close enough to hear each other breathing.
Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared in Adirondack Review, Broad River Review, Chiron Review, The Cortland Review, Emrys Journal, Longleaf Review, New World Writing, The Pinch, Saw Palm, Tampa Review, and many other places. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (2017) and The Shamble (2021), the chapbook In Eynsham (2020), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (2020). His novel, Philisteens, was released in 2021. The collaborative fiction text, Mortality Birds, written with Timothy Dodd, appeared in 2022. He and his wife live in Florida.