Dear Erin, 

I am trying to get in touch with the one who wrote the poems. Please forward this letter to her wherever she is. 

                                                       Love,

                                                       Her Daughter

Some of us are lucky enough to glide through life the apple of our mother's eye. Childhoods full of laughter, and games, warm smells pleasantly wafting from a kitchen, picnics and love. Lots of love.

It will not always be fun and games. Reality makes sure of that. One day will be spent dancing and singing, the next spent doing mind-numbing chores. One day hugs and kisses, the next pursed lips and a furrowed brow. 

But what Minrose Gwin experienced was so far from any semblance of normalcy, that to even read her account of it is nearly bone splintering.  Her days were harrowing countdowns to her mother's raging outbursts, or tension filled evenings between her chronically out of work stepfather and the rest of the family. Pleas to her maternal grandmother to come get her went unheeded. 

Love is a turncoat. A switchblade at the throat. 

Gwin's mother, poet Erin Taylor, fell in love at a young age and married a "dashing" aviation cadet. Fourteen months later, she was divorced and raising a baby whose father wanted nothing to do with her. Eventually, she married another man who had been in trouble with the law and couldn't keep a job to save his life. Unable to pay the rent on time, the family went through numerous moves. Erin eventually supplements the family's meager income with various temp typing jobs, but the unhappy marriage and the frequent mood swings remain. 

Dear Minrose,

I don't know where she is. Sometimes she was here and sometimes she went away.

                                                                                            Your Mother

When and adult Gwin is contacted by members of her family revealing the conditions in which her mother is living -- living and eating in a closet, surrounded by shreds of paper and rodents throughout the house, shrunken from a bout of cancer, plagued by mental illness--she makes the choice to send her mother to a nursing home.