Jose Padua: Driving Out of Town on the Day Before What Would Have Been My Mother’s 93rd Birthday

Driving out of town the day before what would have been
my mother’s 93rd birthday I’m thinking she would have
loved this Brazilian song that’s playing on the car stereo called
“Daqui pro Méier” which goes “imagine the city” or something
like that but in Portuguese and she would have enjoyed watching
the summer’s trees pass by along the highway like a movie and visiting
relatives or people who are nearly relatives and dealing with new pains
while talking about the old days and what’s going on tomorrow
although tomorrow doesn’t stretch out into the distance quite the way
it used to when we’d take long drags on cigarettes then roll down
the car window and flick the ashes out toward the side of the road
and she would have loved the blue and yellow tones of this early evening
Pennsylvania sky as busy as a symphony over the landscape of this small town
so far from Asia the Pacific Ocean home where we’re picking up dinner
from some hole-in-the-wall take-out joint and she would have loved the taste
of black bean sauce over white rice tonight sesame seeds on stir-fried chicken
and cool sips of slightly sweet tea to add punctuation to those spaces
in the conversation where there once was nothing but silence making it so
our time, here on earth, seems to last. A little bit longer.

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Copyright 2025 Jose Padua

Jose Padua is the author of A Short History of Monsters, chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2019. Padua’s work appears in many magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2025.