Category: Tension

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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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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.

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My Daughter’s Potato

It sits in a flimsy pie-tin of crimped and corrugated silver,
wrapped in a paper towel my daughter wets three times
a day. My son tells her to chop it, one eye per chunk,

bury it in the yard, then dig it up. But she’s like me,
needs to see it grow. It’s an Idaho potato, nothing special,
useful under the right cut of meat in the crockpot. It withers

in toward its center, wrinkling a bit, like me, color
sucked from my hair’s roots by—I don’t know—this—
arguing—over why potato eyes are called eyes when

they’re seeds: Put down the knife. Leave her project
be. She’s not sure she wants it now, like the time
I saw my 12-string guitar in the hands of the mover

my husband hired—My lucky day, he said and smiled,
my husband right behind chirping, She never plays it, take it
away. What do they know of the grad school hours,

the ways it saved me from myself, useless in a house
of crying babies—I see, with my blind potato eyes I see
and from behind them I dream of guitars washing up,

like parts of me, like plastic shovels of the hotel tourists,
reds, blues, mostly primary yellows, days’ children
long gone, sandpipers taking back the shore.

—Tania Pryputniewicz, first published in SWWIM Every Day

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To Be a Pilgrim

To be a pilgrim is to ring the stones
with the clean music of your best black heels,
each click a lucky strike that sparks a fire
to see by, that lights up the long and level road
you walk with no map, no stick, no wheels
to relieve you when your feet ache and tire.

To be a pilgrim own what you own,
stuff it in your clutch, lug it in your tote,
all the heavy history you’d like to lose
nestled up against your dead mother’s shoes.
To be a pilgrim you must be a killer
of myth, a new invention of desire.
Every pilgrim is a truth-teller.
Every pilgrim is a liar.

—Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, from Still Pilgrim, Paraclete Press, used by permission of the poet

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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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New Life

One August, my grandmother wears blue jeans
and thumbs a ride from the Caney Mountain foothills
fifty miles north to the crest of Cedar Gap
and the snaking Frisco line.

On as much steam as her own,
the locomotive crawls into old Las Vegas,
where she baptizes her legs
in the El Rancho swimming pool
just long enough to be snatched up
by a flashy suit.

By sundown, she wears the new life
of a showgirl who never returns home.
Gambler’s dotted die latches at temple and wrist.
The only black and white she’s known before—
local newsprint yielding stories
of falling hog prices,
bumper crops of peaches.

—Dave Malone, from O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, 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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Who Am I?

“Let’s go for a walk,”
she’d say, and then my mother
would circle the block. I’d question
why we couldn’t go farther. My body
could handle it. But Merry
Nell’s couldn’t. She needed a horcrux

or, perhaps, more than one horcrux.
To figure that out, she’d need a longer walk
through the neighborhood. She’d be merry,
as she always was. I am a mother
who likes to push her body.
There’s no question

about it. But every day I question
why I am her horcrux.
Why everybody seems to think that I am walking her walk,
that I am mothering like my mother.
It’s true. My name is also Merry,

and I also chose to marry
at 21. That is not the question.
I need to know how to mother
without one. All I have is a horcrux,
one I bring with me each morning I take a walk:
my own body.

But it’s acting strangely, my body.
It’s giving me signs, as yours did, Merry
Nell. Oh, it still can walk
up actual mountains. But I do question
because it doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like a horcrux.
I feel like I am you, my dear, dead mother.

And I’m not, am I? Holy Mary, mother
of God. Pray. You’re not here in body.
Neither is my mom. She’s only a horcrux.
She wasn’t into you, Mary. She didn’t even have a question
about you. Not even when she couldn’t walk.

Like Harry, I am the horcrux. I am not my mother.
I can still walk, and I still dwell in this body.
But I am Merry Megan. No question.

—(Merry) Megan Willome, from The Joy of Poetry, T. S. Poetry Press

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With My Mother, Missing the Train

With My Mother,
Missing the Train

She was always late. At the final minute
we’d run for the city train, which roared right past,
its line of faces scanning us not in it.
The world was turned to terror by the blast
of hot departing wheels. Air seized my mother,
crushing her flustered skirts into a flurry
with me there clinging. Hush, there’ll be another,
she’d say to keep me calm. No need to worry.
But there was a need. The speed of things was true
and rushing traffic urged us both ahead.
I wanted to race again, to burst right through
and make the great train wait. She never said
that missing things was serious, till I grew.
She held my hand more tightly than I knew.

—Helena Nelson, from Plot and Counterplot, featured in The Joy of Poetry, T. S. Poetry Press, by permission of Shoestring Press