Mom kitchen — Axel Void

Mom
Oil on canvas
146x114cm
Miami 2019

I have a wonderful mother. Charming, intelligent, and sensitive. She invents songs and carries the joyful skip of an island girl on her way to see her big brother. She is a junky, no "hard" drugs anymore. Only the new hard ones; she has a bruise on her elbow from sitting in bed on her computer. Her back is shaped as an "s"; it could be from her posture or because someone ran a red light and t-boned her car at 50 miles per hour. They didn’t apologize; they were only concerned about the being at fault.

She hoards boxes of small memories of all of her family members who died. These boxes are infested with roaches and sprinkled with diatomaceous earth. She says it pierces the exoskeleton of the insects. Her health is parallel to the state of her room; they are both maintained but slowly rotting. She wants to create a new nation with a new government and new laws. She has the best of intentions. She always kept the family together; she was a role model, a matriarch. Altruistic and open-minded.

She carries the weight of murder, crack, drowning, paintings, flowers, language, the animals that aren’t there, and the ones that are cigarettes and soda, a shotgun, and handmade jewelry. I miss her, and I get to be with her sometimes.