Author: •

Posted on

Embrace

The baby imprints
her face to your face
forehead to forehead,
mouth to mouth, blowing raspberries on
any soft part of you.

Embrace fleshiness
thick legs strong.
Carry the four-year-old on your back,
the one-year-old on your hip.

Your arms
surround these children
who press themselves
into your body.
Boundless love,
a great acceptance of you
as you are right now:
disheveled, mussed, tired,
unsung in any circle
but this one.

—Lara Payne
 

First appeared in SWWIM Every Day. Used by permission of the poet.

Posted on

Daughter, Home

    Pandemic 2020

Oh I wish for the irrational—
to have her here always,
not two thousand miles away where
her life is after college.
My heart croons a little to hear
her laughter from two floors away, when
I see the dinner table set for three and not two,
the dishwasher loaded with extra bowls
and flatware; when I have to remember
to buy the 1% not the skim milk this time;
when she asks can I please fry up some eggs
over-easy because she says she can never get them
just right; even when I blow it and the yolk breaks
and spills its bright gold all over the pan, to hear her say:
Thanks Mom, that is just fine, this is so good.

—Andrea Potos
 

From Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books, 2021). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Posted on

Mother of Letters

For hours my mother hovered over us,
her hand gently guiding mine, her wrist
a helm for my unsteady ship.
I knew how to hold a pencil,
how to grip it between my thumb
and pointer finger, how to lean softly
to avoid a callus. I knew how to form
all my letters perfectly before starting school.
For every birthday, a new notebook
would appear wrapped tightly with a bow.
I would bury my nose inside it
as if the pages would write themselves
with my breath. The pages I’d fill with words
my young tongue was too knotted to express.

—Tiana Nobile
 

From Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Posted on

02. Snoopy

What does it feel like when you are in fourth grade
and your mom gets cancer?

It feels like that day I brought my Snoopy
lunchbox to school, the yellow plastic one
that snapped closed with a click,
got left on the playground, forgotten.
The next morning that playground was covered
with shards of yellow plastic.

What else can you do but bring your lunch in brown paper bags
for the rest of the year
for the rest of every school year to come
and pretend you like it that way.

—Megan Willome, reprinted from her series My Mother’s Diary

Posted on

Bon Voyage

We’ve gathered on the dock. Mother wears a custom-made suit, bold black and white checks, the skirt fitted tight. My sister and I teeter beside her, two untethered buoys, dresses buoyant in the breeze. With her hand shading her eyes, Mother watches the ship, a sailing city crowded with waving couples against a white, white exterior. Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage, we cry to friends of Mother’s, the wife barely recognizable beneath a veiled hat. Corks burst from champagne bottles; shrieks as the bubbling liquid pours over hands and arms. After the ship retreats with an exaggerated Honk, we huddle in the back seat of the car. Let’s pretend we’re sleeping on the ship’s deck chairs, we whisper, and imagine the evening growing colder. Clinging together, our shivering bodies wrapped in widely striped towels. Two girls alone on a boat, the water black and rushing past, lips salty.

—Tina Barry
 

From Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Posted on

First Grade

Nudged awake,
in the still-dark morning,
by the sound of her shower’s rainfall—

I’d drag my aqua comforter to the toast-colored carpet
outside Mom’s bathroom. I’d drop the heap
and loll in the folds,
watching mist rise
from the slit of light beneath the door.

Before the tap of words was opened,
I’d ease into the school day,
inhaling her drugstore citrus,
and listening to the downpour
break on her first.

—Bethany Rohde

(first published at Mothers Always Write)

Posted on

Her Hair, a Braid

Lips wavy in the chrome teapot’s reflection,
you mouth for-ty, slowly, and again,
for-ty, as if it were a word discovered,
not the years since your mother’s death.

Would it help if I mention the boxes
in the basement?
She’s there, in a tin, loosely wound
beneath sepia tissue paper, a braid
to worry in your fingers.

I want to tell you I wore a coat
today with a fur collar
like your mother’s mink pelts.
Black and oily, they smelled
of crowded ships and herring,
wood smoke on snow.

—Tina Barry

 
From Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Posted on

My mother, the fixer

I imagine when she
shot the raccoon
as it drank the tepid
mid-day rain
from my brothers’
kindergarten-colored,
water-dotted
plastic play set,
she used the sun’s
ray as a scope,
the weight of
my pudgy infant brother
pulling tight like a sling
on her arm, another son
clinging to her calves,
clamping her to the earth
with the steadying force
of ten toddler fingers
as she slid open
the screen door, pointed
the barrel at the backyard menace
and pulled the trigger
just once,
without ceremony
without raising her
blood pressure,
heart rate, eyebrow-simply
disappearing the problem
as if she was smoothing
the wrinkles of a sheet.

—Shannon Curtin, from Motherland
 
 
 
Anchor & Plume Press. Used by permission of the poet.

Posted on

Back to Life

Daughter delivered by an attendant:
silent and watchful in your orphanage smock
with the cartoon dog, and pilled mended pants.
A smell of mildew came from your shock

of sweaty, cropped black hair. Stuck to your chest,
in English and Chinese a name tag read
Happy Springtime: a name pressed
upon you by no father, mother. Closeted

from the world before you came to us, as if
in some ancient tomb carving of a child
rising from the grave in a flowing shift.
Freed from the humid earth, she almost smiles.

You don’t remember, but love to be told
how they brought you through the doors and you were ours.
But buried in you is that place, still. Were you cold,
solitary, left wanting, maybe for hours . . .

Don’t go there, I tell myself. Instead,
I grab you and inhale your fragrant head.

—Carole Bernstein, from Buried Alive—A To-Do List

Posted on

The Wordless: The Unspoken and Unnamed

At six months pregnant, the limits of language make me cry
about every sound: all the lowing cellos—sounds strung up

on laundry lines, displayed like underwear flapping itself crisp
and unopening, how the bow moves like wind across strings—

every tinny brass—beaten into my palms, stalled and toed
up my arms. I don’t play an instrument, but I’m missing

words to explain how every sound feels, how it feels
to grow another woman inside me, how to explain God—
          mostly that—

and the child with my hair and eyes I’ll never someday have. How
can sadness mean all this? The words, nameless as the Water-
          Drawers,

the Damsels, the 10 Concubines of David—all the unworded
          women,
unmouthed and untounged mothers and daughters. Some word
          must

exist to give language to all the women who exist only in the
          sigh and struggle—
the shuffle on of boots in lingering lines—all those lost to silence.

—Allison Blevins, from A Season for Speaking

 
Seven Kitchens Press. Used with permission of the poet.