Pink Azalea

Once she lived in Arizona and she got an award, so her mother sent her an azalea. It was pink
                  and pretty, so out of place in the apartment of nubby beige and ochre chair covers,
                  cigarette smoke, monsoon grit.

All her life, she’d been touching her fingertips to a voice she hoped would thrive. Sometimes it
                  was her interior smartass that woke up when she was drunk. Sometimes it was
                  weeping or a terrible cough.
When she heard herself in the night, the songs she yearned for unraveled, held no duration.

The azalea bloomed. Yet most days she drank herself downward; she’d start out lively, bellowing
                 Running on Empty while flinging herself around the so-called living room. She
                 showered, went to work, tidied up, read books, but she can’t recall grocery shopping
                 or making meals other than coffee. Did she ever vacuum? There was a time a dead
                 azalea in its crimson foil perched by the doormat waiting for a ride.  

It used to be that the boyfriends were most important—someone’s presence, the testing of that
                  sliver of voice this woman called love. When young, she’d wanted a name that was
                  more romantic, the name of someone in a book! At first, she thought Laura; even
                  better, Lauren, which was less common! But the only Lauren she’d ever known had
                  been raped by a man who came up the fire escape in Baltimore. That girl, already so
                  wildly frail, was paired up with guitar-wielding George and his boa constrictor. Back
                  then, few women had language for one another; they kept it to soften men. The
                  woman, with that dead plant still at her doorway, tossed those memories like socks
                  into the bureau drawer. Still so many missing, so many torn that weren’t hers with
                  their secret and disheveled mysteries.  

So now she has watched her mother’s body die—vivid, shocking, slow. Mean-mouthed, bossy,
                  big-hearted, the mother continued to suck the voice out of her daughter while
                  pressuring her with gifts: an enormous illuminated Bible, one furry black bear
                  footstool, an original pen and ink llama cartoon, gift certificates to Land’s End, and her
                  death—that stock-still absence, its whirlwind.

What happened to Lauren, to Baltimore, to the Arizona roommates who once or twice watered
                  the azalea? Pain flourished but never without a sense that an array of jeweled futures
                  was waiting to be plucked, tried on like disco clothes, glittering but easily discarded
                  were they ill-fitting.

Her mother’s mouth fell open all the time. Out in the world, so many voices on the page or
                  singing, TV voices, politicians—some rude, some elegant—so loud and intrusive they
                  drowned out children screaming from hospitals, they chewed the edges of sitcoms,
                  like dogs howling or that lone rooster interrupting the donkey’s bray from the top of
                  the pasture.

4 a.m., her roommate’s cat paws this woman’s cheek, mews, and briefly, touch becomes voice. In
                  Phoenix, monsoon dust settles far from a man’s hand pressed down hard on
                  someone’s mouth back in Baltimore. Yet one time is always another time as both
                  women wake, woven into early birdsong.  A person may keep reaching her forefinger
                  towards a first word, but it’s the second and third—the onward—which she’s really
                  hoping for, intends.