The day before Mom died, she wanted basil
in her tomato soup. It’s delicious, she told me
as if she were discovering it for the first time—
tomato basil soup evangelism, a convert—
it’s all she wanted to eat. And when we ran
out of basil, my sister volunteered to run
to the store and bring back a plastic
bottle of the sad, dry leaves, McCormick,
a step up from Great Value, and she ate her
soup with vigor, and she told us the drain
the surgeon put in her liver smelled like
beer, and she cackled. It’s funny, she told me.
The day before Mom died, her shoulders
were massive from powering her wheelchair
through the soft Oregon soil, thick with grass
and every rose she had heard of. The electric
chair only got stuck, she told me. I grew
wild roses in Kansas—stubby, ugly things,
with five petals each—they grew more like weeds,
and tomato soup only ever tasted like watery
ketchup, no matter how much basil that
I did or didn’t have.