Angelica Jochim

Last July in North Dakota


I never dreamed I would sit
with my mother this way,
the two of us hunched over plates
of leftover Chinese food,
brown sauce staining the white
containers discarded on
the hotel room desk.
Our faces frozen like
paper mache’.

Us, in unmatched chairs that didn’t
fit the table,
pulling ourselves up to it anyway,
tasting only grief,
hopelessness
lining the walls,
tracing the doorframe,
leaking along the baseboards.

The television always on,
turned up loud
so my mother could hear.

Two blocks away,
my brother’s body laid out,
his made up face the wrong color.

I stared out the 13th floor window
to the night sky shrouded in stormclouds,
pressed my face to the glass,
and waited for rain.