Read This or I'll Bump Off My Cat

This is the Best Thing you'll read all day, possibly all week.

So says my (biased) therapist (a New Yorker subscriber), who wants me to submit what follows (to the New Yorker). I wouldn't really bump off my cat. That was just a reference to an old postcard I have: Under a photo of a friendly-looking pooch, with a gun held to its head by someone out of frame, was this header:

Buy this or we shoot the dog.

(Sorry. I thought it was hysterical.)

What follows is a true story. To prove it to you, I took the photo above.

The Last Sliver of Soap

Here I stand in the white shower stall
warm water thrumming on my back
holding the last sliver of soap on my palm,

a thin, pink, oval broach, end piece
of the bar I salvaged 100 days ago
from my dead mother’s bath. I anoint

my body with it this one final time,
beginning the rite — unchanging rite —
of showering, raising my left arm

to salute the God I serve, raising then
my right arm to salute the strength
He gave me, rubbing the last sliver

of soap between my palms. Leg up
next, as if to step up to an altar,
honoring the march of days in a life.

With a stone’s smooth polish, soap
glides over my belly and breasts
blessing the lives they have nourished,

and in this rite I remember the day
my old mother yelled Shit! in the shower,
withered butt sagging and dignity pierced

as I and the aide conspired to cleanse her.
She hated the shower, demented but clear
that washing her body tormented her soul.

I hear her, and see her, and she is alive
as the last sliver of soap slips in my hands.
This was her brand, her ceremonial bar

night in and night out, preparing for bed,
emerging anointed, blessed be the day.
I pause in the shower to savor her then

holding what’s left of a relic of soap
the final memento I claimed from her room
the morning she died, a used bar of soap.

100 days later, the bar is a shard, last tie
to her body now buried in dirt, and she
requires no cleansing but I baptize myself

in the name of my mother, a holy bond.
The last sliver of soap in my hand is
sacred and I’ll save it, box it in velvet

tuck it away with a note, an intimate
totem of the woman she was, some earth
and a heart before God washed her away.