We are looking out the windows at the city,
the mountain. We see the sky all over us. He
says, Ma – your apartment is surrounded
by parking lots. Then my son, who lives
in LA, a place where no one stops driving
long enough to park, opens his silver laptop
to show me an experiment in cybermagic.

As he clicks his way there, I remember him
saying, I know I’ve been your experiment.
The man from Los Angeles didn’t know yet:
we’re all experiments. Everybody’s looking
for results, conclusions. Everybody’s guessing.
Everybody’s testing testing one two testing.
Nobody ever knows how it’ll come out.

I made him out of what I had to work with
then: malts, ribs, pizza, the occasional apple,
maybe cole slaw with carrots. I was cooking him
for nine months the year A Clockwork Orange
was new, and people started using the word
sexism. When he was done, we went to school,
changing our major: biology to sociology.

When my son goes to movies, sits in the dark
with Americans watching men hurt women, he
gets sick. He wants to leave when men hit
women. He says, pushing out through glass
doors into California sunshine: This is my
mother’s fault. She raised me so I can’t stand
this, can’t just sit there like a normal person.

 
First published in 5AM - Summer, 2007