Another hometown poem

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-1:25

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My mom beckons me to her living room window.
“Look,” she says, “this deer has only three feet.
We watched her return after she lost it, worried
that she would die. But she’s doing great.”
The deer walks with a little hop, her back left hoof gone—
just the air between her loss and the earth.
*
My little daughter humming
among strawberry plants, plucking.
My middle son swinging on a tree swing
when he thinks no one is looking.
Me pressing my face flat against the glass
to follow two fawns’ flickering trail.
*
At the ice cream shop with the orange walls
where I posed for pictures with my high school friends:
I see a blonde woman waiting, so pregnant
that her toddler can ride her belly like a boat.
I think of her as my peer until I shake my head
and remember that I’ll be forty-nine in a month.
My body and brain don’t know that yet. They reach
for the high round bump, the baby burgeon
and warble the words
home, home, home.