Do You Get Depressed? by Robert Cooperman

Two weeks after your mother fell—
trying to climb a stepladder
for something on a high shelf
she could’ve waited for you to hand her
when you’d stop by after work,
a shattered hip for her impatience—
the physical therapist asked,

“Do you get depressed?”

“I get disgusted,” she stared so hard
at the young man she could’ve drilled
a hole in his head,” you tell me in emails.

You wonder how much more disgusted
she’d be in our pandemic, the president
she refused to vote for, a vicious Elmer Fudd.

The first time you visited her in the hospital,
she had the TV on, to one of his campaign rallies,
shaking her fist: thin and frail
as mouse bones, the rage of a grizzly bear.

“Mom,” you reasoned, “why do you subject
yourself to his loathsome nonsense?”

“Disgust,” she answered, “the more
disgusted I get, the more I know I’m alive.”

“If she were still here,” you sadly quip,
“she’d be running disgusted marathons.”

I can all-but-see-you take a pull on your beer,
after raising the bottle to her memory.



Robert Cooperman's latest collection is The Ghosts and Bones of Troy (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming from Finishing Line Press is the chapbook All Our Fare-Thee-Wells.