Pink Sofa

I wince while she lowers her bones, clutching the counter with one

hand and finding tile with the other. Together we sit on the kitchen

floor. This is the only quiet.

My face is only just drying from tears I couldn’t help. My head

still hurts from their voices... You’re so ignorant and How can

you say that? and I don’t believe a word you’re saying.

My mother reaches up to the table and shows me her

mug, the one she always uses with the pink flowers. You

know, I had bought this for my first apartment; I was your

age.

As I try to count how many cups of coffee she had over all those

years, she traces the petals with her thumb. Maybe she wants a

garden. To kneel into the earth without pain each day. She

would

grow tomatoes too, securing the vines up wooden stakes, so they get

enough sunlight and don’t fall. A snail chomping on a piece of mint she

drops on purpose would be the loudest sound.

I had also bought a pink sofa back then, she smiles. You would’ve loved

it. The floor begins to grow, or perhaps, we start to shrink onto one

single tile, friends solaced for a moment by a hue of soft pink.

~

Livia Meneghin is a MFA student at Emerson College, where she also teaches in the Writing Studies Program. She is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair, and has individual poems published in So to Speak Feminist Journal, tenderness lit, The Rockvale Review, F&M's Alumni Arts Review, and others. Livia is also the Event Coordinator at I AM Books Bookstore in Boston, a little shop she calls home.