BLUE SWEATER

I make the mistake of asking my mother
where she got that pretty blue sweater.

I don’t remember, she says and shrugs in apology.
I try to follow the rules for talking to people

with Alzheimer’s—to avoid asking the kinds
of questions that depend on memory, to resist

the urge to correct her when she believes,
for instance, that we are in a restaurant

when in fact we are in the dining room
of the memory care facility, or that I am

her favorite niece, or that the doctor
is mocking her, or that people want to steal

her stuffed animals. I’m floating, she says,
and closes her eyes. Hoping so for both

of our sakes, I ask her if the floating
is pleasant. But no. It’s scary, she says.

I do and don’t want to know what she means.
Drifting in an edgeless ocean, I imagine,

a melting ice sheet carried by indifferent waves,
cold, and so alone. I take her hand, hold it in mine,

an anchor, warm and heavy. She opens her eyes
and sees me as if for the first time today.

What a beautiful sweater, I say.

Lynn Cohen has been published in Amelia, Amethyst Magazine, Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, The Chained Muse, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Flights, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Oberon Poetry Magazine, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, Peregrine, The Phoenix, SLAB, Spotlong Review, St. Katherine’s Review, Swamp Ape Review, Thin Air Magazine, and Trampoline. Her novel A Terrible Case of Beauty was published by Trebol Press in 2013. She received a Best of the Net nomination from Apricity Magazine in 2023.