The Wasting (edit3)

[heslopian]

Leah/bena/ella edit2 Thank you!

The Wasting

Mother ghosts Is "ghosts" being used as a verb here? If so, I like it! 
past attic dormers,
between the cloaked furnishings
and forgotten mementos
crated up for years. She’s acquiesced
to death since Father's departure,  

but she is not dying. We keep her
blood thinned with warfarin,
the same poison others reserve
for prowling rodents.  So begins the wonderful nastiness which makes this poem such a bitter treat, like a draught of bitter lemon.

Most assume she’s sedated
from her vacant gape, as she watches
time compress into shale Absolutely excellent metaphor. Really, divinely inspired. This may be my favourite line in the poem.
on the Game Show Network. Broadcasting
signs of culture shock,
she‘s tattooed-teenager-disturbed, An original way of inferring mental regression. 
retreating from body piercings,
LED lighting and the internet.

Wearing blue hair nets,
she passes her hours moaning of aches
through smudged panes. A very subtle way of indicating loneliness, and all in all a painfully nasty verse. (That's a good thing. I think...)

Insufferably, I listen to her "Insufferably" has an awkward grammatical position here. As a reader I guess it means that your narrator finds listening to her insufferable, but from a strict grammatical perspective the line suggests that your narrator's being insufferable in how he listens to her.
recite details of doctor visits
and medical tests concluding
that she is in good health- Could this line, and the poem, end like so: "that she won't be joining Dad/any time soon"? The "is in good health" bit seems to labour the point, somewhat. We can infer the good health from the fact she won't be joining Dad any time soon.

and won’t be joining Dad
any time soon.

The poem is a delightfully mean-spirited domestic horror story. It does lack a certain point, a reason for existing. Why did we need to be told this story? Maybe the word I'm looking for is urgency. It exists in and of itself without really saying anything that reaches beyond the narrative. Is it a comment on parental relationships, for instance, or sociopathy, or greed, or what? That said, it's still really well written, evocative and effective. My critique is, of course, JMHO. Thank you for the read