Conversations With My Mother.

My mother calls me while she is at work,
and chats about the weather and the war in
Iraq.
She says she has seen thirteen patients in
four hours-mostly the elderly who complained
about everything from applesauce to
the climate change in New Zealand.

I do not have a job. I am a freelance artist,
and worked ten to seven pm every day,
painting pictures that will be thrown in the
trash later, just because I didn’t like them.

I only managed to sell one painting when
I was seven years old, and my grandmother
gave me fifty cents for a portrait of herself
I had drawn at school.

I remembered school. The place with the desks,
and the books you could take home.
My mother is still chatting away, on and on and on.
I looked out the window at the
flower on the windowsill,
and thought about Israel.