Theft    

by Nina Rubinstein Alonso


        1. rings

Three rings gone
someone bathed her

rubbed lotion on her hands
helped her dress and put her to bed

then slipped rings in a pocket but
aides shake their heads and look away

when I ask where’s one gold and
two silver she always wore

pretending they’re misplaced
by my ninety-five year old mother

who misses what I gave her
leaving her jewel box barren

with paste pearls a broken bracelet
safety pins and two mismatched buttons
 
I kiss her cheek and stroke
her empty fingers.


        2. the photo

The photo by the hospital bed
is my sacred white-bearded guru

cosmic eyes watching
my husband’s coma

fading dying of cancer and
the day his breath stops
 
I reach tear-glazed for that photo
as I have nothing else but it’s gone

taken maybe for the brass frame
narrow-eyed nurses have nothing to say

about robbing the dead
one more bruise on a wounded day.


        3. clothes and a tv

I buy my father sweatshirts
and pants to keep him warm

in the frozen hell of dementia
but in two weeks they’re gone

shabby shreds left in the closet
then his tv disappears switched

for junk with no picture or sound
in this classy carpeted nursing home

I’m a Greek chorus wailing
for desolate elders on the shore

gray feathers plucked and torn
by thieves who think it’s no matter
  
old birds don’t know what they eat
can’t find names or follow tunes—

greed requires coldness of heart
in stone-eyed vulture-beaked scavengers.


* * * * *

Nina Rubinstein Alonso’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker,
Ibbetson Street, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Peacock Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, Southern Women’s Review, etc.  Her book This Body was published by David Godine Press, her chapbook Riot Wake is upcoming from Červená Barva Press and a story collection is in the works.