[Poetry] i am older than my mother

Read the third-place entry for our week of December 8, 2024 prompt, Finite Time, chosen by guest judge Oliver Burkeman

i am older than my mother
by Kathlene Kelly

i am older than my mother by 38 years.

i am older than my mother
                         by 41,757 cups of coffee
                         an undetermined number of cigarettes.
                                                  she quit first.

i am older than my mother
                         by 13,919 alarm clocks, 
                         11 cities, and 41 addresses
                                                  i tend to prefer a geographic solution.

i am older than my mother
by 10,000 lamentations
over adult acne, 
crow’s feet, sagging skin, 
                         any dermatological atrocity 
her twice daily Oil of Olay 
was meant to forestall.

i am older than my mother —
                         demolition derby in my head continuing 
                         long after she got a black flag
                         for crashing into life backwards, 
                         bumper dragging, engine on fire,
                         praying for a Best-In-Show award			
                                                  no one else could give her.

i am older than my mother.
                         off the raceway out of the bottle 
                         away from the pills out of strange beds
                         sacrificing the craving for poison
                                                  miraculously, to show up	here.

i am older than my mother by a single gun shot —
                         four days of newspapers piled at the door 
 	                         answering machine turned off		
                                           cat given away
                                                    strangers bearing the news.

i am older than my mother.
orphaned scarred tattooed  
head shaved disposition questionable,			
fourteen years without booze and drugs 
                         poetry to replace the poison.


i am older than my mother.

A Note From Our Guest Judge,

Oliver Burkeman

I found these reflections on finite time poignant and stirring without exception, so they presented me with my own uncomfortable confrontation with limitation: being obliged to choose one winner from multiple deserving entries. I chose for first place a meditation on youth, death, and memory that brought into focus for me the strangeness of what it is to be a human, alive in the river of time, and the last line of which gave me goosebumps. I also wanted to mention the extraordinary power of the use of the second-person perspective in the entry I ranked second. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read these.

About Kathlene Kelly

Kathlene Kelly is a former healthcare provider and educator who is using old age to discover her creative voice. She currently lives in Western Massachusetts (US) but will tell anyone who will listen that she’s from a town in Montana “where all old hippies go to die”.

She has a dog named Kevin, a reasonable number of tattoos, and knows how to dissect a cadaver. Most days she can be found drinking coffee and…well…that’s the important part.

This piece was written in response to the prompt Finite Time.