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.