Michelle Stoll
The Slip

When she still knew how to crack an egg, 
tell a joke, gossip, she’d fret over the fast-food fish 
we’d slipped out to get while my father slept 

decades before in a hospital bed. Between bites 
of hushpuppies and slaw, he was gone. 
The living must eat, sleep, keep going 

until they don’t, I told her, as if to speak sense 
to her orphaned heart. The dying will time 
their breaths, waiting for someone to arrive 

or leave. Friends and family recite such words, 
platitudes, rosaries meant to comfort, hasten a return 
from uncomfortable grief. I sat with my mother 

when her time came, expected her to exit dramatically 
after switching off machines, pulling out tubes. 
Vigil, I called it, as if it were a family ritual. 

For two days she dawdled until I left to sleep, then 
fledged. To stay awake – such a simple thing 
for a daughter who knows what happens when you slip 

from the room, glance back at your mother’s 
mouth, open like a baby bird, saying Stay, 
like a mama saying Go.



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Image by Curcan from Unsplash+
Michelle Stoll lives in North Little Rock, Arkansas. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women. Her poems have appeared in journals such as SLANT, Galway Review, Crosswinds, Rock Paper Poem, River Heron Review, and is forthcoming in Pine Hill Review. She was shortlisted for the Wigtown International Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the River Heron Poetry Prize. Michelle has served on the editorial teams of Poetry South and SLANT. She currently works for a conservation organization rooted in the rural South.
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