Category: Caregiving

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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.

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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.

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Tricks

At fifteen, I drew stick figures
of my parents and me,
without flesh or feature,
quick, sexless.
Dissatisfied, I turned my pencil aslant
adding a tipped smile,
breasts and fingernails.
Knowing the tricks of the graphite then
I saw how easy it was to cause
and not analyze.
I could add apples to a tree’s branches
whether it had foliage or not,
and a peach tree could bear plums.

My drawings of my children are dimpled.
They shine like glazed paper.
This one of my son seems overpopulated,
so I will erase the brain that bedevils him
with pleated thoughts shuffling
like poker cards.
If I rub the eraser across my daughter’s heart
she’ll make her way like a straight-eyed
comet, leaving a wake of hunger.

—Luanne Castle, from Doll God

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A. M. : Inside and Out

Here is the landscape of my son,
prying open the horizon with his grin;
of my daughter, trying to crack the sun
with her large laughter.

What of the clock that clucks, “No, no, no”?
They’ve flushed it down the commode
with all the toilet-training paraphernalia
until it backs up in the pipes,
bulges beautifully into the hills
that belch so early, “Hello, hello, good morning.”

Of course, we must answer,
must gather up the dew and daffodils
in our nightshirts, comb our hair through
with the larks’ incessant trill,
our two small ones trailing after us
into the wonderfully, brightening world.

—Marjorie Maddox, from Local News from Someplace Else

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Counterbalance

                It was horrible but it wasn’t all horrible.
                —Cecilia Woloch

Afterward, it was the satisfaction of paying a debt, except
she wasn’t one of those mothers who made us feel
as if we owed her for childbirth and raising us.
It was knowing I didn’t shirk changing the colostomy bag
or dressing the disfigured zipper of staples that closed
her wound, breastbone to groin.

Once I woke to a midnight crash: her with a halo of blood
on the bathroom floor.
It was knowing I could love like that.

Mealtimes, she would frown, push away child’s portions
no matter what recipe I tried, except the marijuana-pill night
when at 10 p.m. she asked me to bake a cake,
and I called my sister: Mum has the munchies!

Chemo shrank her into a stooped monk in a hooded robe.
Strands of fine hair littered her pillow
until it was time to shop for a wig.
I tried on some too. We laughed when I looked worse than she did.
She sprang for the expensive one, nicknamed it Dixie,
felt almost pretty.

And she recovered: her sweetness, generosity,
pain-in-the-ass-ness, even her hair for seven years.
Then it was hearing cancer again from the doctor
who didn’t want to say it, and me expelling the word
like a magician pulling a grenade from my mouth.

I hoped hospice spoke the truth, that it was okay not to feed her,
that her mostly closed eyes, the rambling words
meant she was processing what she needed to: memories,
reconciliations, the willingness to go.
Then, it was knowing she had checked off her final item
when my brother arrived, recovered from his own cancer,
and she woke for a last moment to say his name, Philip.

—Karen Paul Holmes, from No Such Thing as Distance

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Stayed

for Ann Voskamp

Why do we not
leave home.
Is it really for fear
of what lies
beyond, or rather
for fear that the
roof will abscond
with the doors
and the shutters
we’ve always known.
And who would they
blame if it happened
just so, if the whole
curtained place simply
picked up its stakes,
disappeared on the wind
in our absence. What
are we really afraid
of, why do we not
leave home.

—L.L. Barkat, from InsideOut: Poems, International Arts Movement

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Cooking Class, Illinois, Mid 70s

Along her immaculate counter: silo
of red-handled sifter, bright order
of silver spoons, lemon bales of butter

softening in late winter light. In cupboards
her husband the carpenter built, bars
of Baker’s Chocolate, dried figs, quartered

apricots and Mason Jars of brined harvest.
A good cook puts up her hair, wears
apron, stores flour in freezer to keep

Boll Weevils out, uses shells of her egg
as a tool to separate yolk from white.
She also wears dresses, I learned

when, for donning jeans, she informed me
she no longer wished me to babysit. She cited,
over the phone to my mother, the effect

it might have on her son, the kind of wife
he might choose, the man he’d become
as I chased him on my hands and knees round

the living room’s glass table she refused to move
when he was born. He’d learn, she’d said, he’d learn
soon enough, where he stopped and she began.

— Tania Pryputniewicz, from Casual: A Little Book of Jeans Poems & Photos, T. S. Poetry Press

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Anyday

Wash some dirty dishes
Gather up rumpled clothes
Diaper a soft pink bottom
Change the sheets
Pluck a few stray eyebrows
Wonder why
Feed hungry mouths
Drink some black tea
Pick crumbs off the couch
Change the batteries
Read Moo Baa La La La again
Wander room to room
Barely balance an account
Shampoo little brown curls
Pass out vitamins
Write a couple lines of code
Kiss husband hello or goodbye
Scribble a grocery list
Wish vaguely
Sweep up dried playdough chunks
Empty the dishwasher
Fold warm scented laundry
Brush sixty-eight teeth
Type a blog post
Lay my head down
Whisper a prayer
Get one day closer

—T.U.C., first appeared at Tweetspeak Poetry

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Bottled Water

I go to the corner liquor store
for a bottle of water, middle
of a hectic day, must get out
of the office, stop making decisions,
quit obsessing does my blue skirt clash
with my hot pink flats; should I get
my mother a caregiver or just put her
in a home, and I pull open the glass
refrigerator door, am confronted
by brands—Arrowhead, Glitter Geyser,
Deer Park, spring, summer, winter water,
and clearly the bosses of bottled water:
Real Water and Smart Water—how different
will they taste? If I drink Smart Water
will I raise my IQ but be less authentic?
If I choose Real Water will I no longer
deny the truth, but will I attract confused,
needy people who’ll take advantage
of my realness by dumping their problems
on me, and will I be too stupid to help them
sort through their murky dilemmas?
I take no chances, buy them both,
sparkling smart, purified real, drain both bottles,
look around to see is anyone watching?
I’m now brilliantly hydrated.

—Kim Dower, from Slice of Moon, featured in The Joy of Poetry,
T. S. Poetry Press, by permission of Red Hen Press