MY MOTHER MEETS HER GUARDIAN ANGEL
He was an ordinary-looking man wearing a hat and tan trench coat,
detective-style. He knew the underworld and our world
and had come to a centenarian to deliver a message. He sat across
from her by the dining room wall. “No one else saw him,” she said twice,
matter-of-factly. “I offered him a cup of coffee. He told me
something important, but I forget what it was.”
Like a church, my mother’s bedroom is crowded with statues
and images of her favorite saints. Above her bed, the Sacred Heart
of Jesus stretches out his arms as if breaking through
the enormous gilded frame. Throughout her life, she repeats two dreams
from her youth, as vivid in the retelling as if they had slipped
into her sleep yesterday. “Two men are following me as I walk
along the East River. I’m alone and terrified as they get closer
and closer. All of a sudden, Jesus pulls me up and away from them.”
My mother, in tears, her voice quivering, continues. “Did you know
I slept in the same bed with Aunt Sarah and Aunt Anna?
Above our bed was a picture of Jesus on the cross, and every night
I kissed His feet. One night I dreamed he fell off the cross
onto my shoulders. I cried out so loud that both of my sisters woke up.”
*
“Did I tell you my guardian angel visited me?” my mother asks again
on my next visit and the next. I nodded, recalling last Christmas
when she reported the flight of angels from their display
on her bedroom dresser. Nearly blind, she sees into other worlds,
and I wonder if she’s counting down while looking up for answers.
Bio:
Maria Terrone’s poetry collections are No Known Coordinates (The Word Works, 2025), Eye to Eye; A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Prize, Ashland Poetry Press), The Bodies We Were Loaned, as well as two chapbooks. Credits: Poetry, Ploughshares, and work in more than 30 anthologies. At Home in the New World was her creative nonfiction debut. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most diverse communities in America. http://www.mariaterrone.com
OVUNQUE SIAMO 