ELVIS ON THE RADIO

My mother's voice is a chorus, a long, drawn out sigh to the outdated songs on the radio as she swings around in her discount wedding dress, legs moonlight in the sparse apartment. Our lives are packed up in grease-stained boxes, but she grabs my hands, says "Moy khoroshiy, you are everything to me."

She's said this before; to lovers and to kids, to her old piano and the barista at the coffee shop we never had enough money to go to. I can love her sometimes for this. She's never said this to my father. She loves in seconds, my mother. Moy khoroshiy. She is like a memory already, in the way I can love her but not touch her. I am hers, a backbreaking cry of belonging splitting the room in two, splitting my face in two as a smile I have not felt in months cleaves through the air. Or maybe that's the laughter. The laughter, of course. A foreign sound. The belonging and the light, the light rising through the broken window we haven't yet fixed but my mother is unbroken in the spears of sun.

Here, she's all in blue, and the flowers on her dress are faded. There's lipstick on her teeth, smudged crimson as her lips fall open, hair coming out of a chignon and clinging to the nape of her neck. She's so thin I could break her but she is mine. This is my mother as I will not remember her, but the mother I want. This is how the moment goes in my head:

1) My mother loves me
2) She reaches for my hands
3) The sun rises, and the light breaks us into fragments
4) We dance to Elvis when they still played him on the radio
5)  We are infinite.

This memory is close enough to that, and she presses me close to her as the music shifts into something sweet, something minor that catches alight in my ears, music like fire. The radio singing, take it easy, take it easy, take it easy. The static corrodes to her heart thumping a butterfly beat against my cheek, her saying, "You know, I love you so much, moy khoroshiy. Moy khoroshiy."