Barbara O’Dair
MONSTER
Today I bought a shower chair. I’m not old, just dizzy.
Recently, I had to sit down on the tile floor to wash my hair,
insult upon injury—when I moved here, I pulled out
the grip bar in the bathtub wall because it was ancient and unneeded.
A couple lived in this house for 50 years, and when their son put it on the market,
they were placed in separate facilities: the realtor told us that the wife had dementia
whereas the husband was just old.
One day, when my infant was asleep, the woman showed up, thin and grim,
and began yelling on the lawn and pointing at a window in the attic as if she remembered
something terrible, and it was too close to a horror show, like a baby killer with a killer baby.
If I open the door, she might strike me. I will now admit that, in my new mother stupor,
I lost it, locked the door, held the baby close, and called the cops.
When they showed up, one of them looked me hard in the eye and said,
She’s just a lost old woman. She won’t hurt you. He said they would drive her back
to the memory care unit, and I swear I didn’t have his grace, I kept her out of a house
that once was hers because her nightgown scared me, and I was the confused one.
Barbara O’Dair received an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She was selected by the late Tom Lux as the winner of Mudfish 9’s annual poetry contest and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. She has published poetry, book reviews, and essays in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Semiotexte, Wisconsin Review, Alaska Quarterly, Nerve, Feminist Review, among others, and in several anthologies.