Category: Mother

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

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

And My Love Goes With Him

in bursts of static song over a short-wave radio
in the coldest winter tucked into his blue wool socks

through the red, muddy water in the gutter after rain
in the cornerstone of the ground floor of his dormitory

woven into the wonderful purple of a southern twilight
and the strutting peacock of a clear mid-afternoon sky

up a steep ladder, down a steep hill: wherever he draws
breath: the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the pine

—Donna Vorreyer, from A House of Many Windows

Posted on

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

Posted on

Question in the Face of Devotion

She has her sights set on India
her face holds a goddess glow when she shows me
the project on a cartoon colored map.

Her green eyes shock me deep into my green heart
she is a whisper in a silk sari
rose-gold bracelets sing on her brown wrists.

Will she disrobe in Goa
swim in the Arabian Sea
make a string bikini offering
leave her hammer on the shore?

She left her running shoes on my doorstep
I hold them like a cat’s trophy, see the shape of her
toe in the leather, feel the bending of her soul.

—Vicki Vener Iorio, from Poems from the Dirty Couch