Visiting Hours
Laura Zapico

Through a maze of heavy locked doors,
illuminated fluorescent green,
there’s a room furnished with couches—
cast-offs, the fabric thinned by elbows
and torn to the wood as if by cats
sharpening their claws.
There’s a grey-bearded man perched birdlike,
unresponsive to the wife who sits murmuring,
squeezing his knee.
There’s a woman, milky-skinned,
who pulls nits, imagined or real,
from a nest of black hair
and snaps them between her teeth.
And there’s my mother,
who except for her eyes,
glassy and strange,
looks the same as she did before
she started talking about the Devil
as someone she knew.
Before she poured boiling soup on her thighs
and stood beside the stove, enchanted,
savoring each watery blister.