Tag: daughter

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC by Alison Seevak

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Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC

There are no mothers here
but when your daughter
invites you, you go and sit
on the wooden bench, grateful
to be there, after months
of silence. You sit next to the girl
holding the ring that fell
from her septum the night before
while your daughter’s in back,
getting the stud in the cartilage
of her left ear replaced
with a thin gold hoop.
It’s a rook, she’d explained
before the dark eyed piercer
with the sleeve of tattoos
called her name.
She’d traced the map
on the wall, showed you
the geography of all the ways
an ear can be pierced.
Conch, orbital, daith, helix.
Snakebites,
the name for the silver
studs dotting each side
of her lower lip. The post jutting
through her left eyebrow
looks like it hurts,
but it doesn’t, she said
and you remember
other waiting rooms,
pediatrician, orthodontist,
math tutor, ice rink,
the ER when she was five,
fell out of bed, and broke
her collar bone. The nurse
pulled you into the long corridor
so they could talk to her alone,
so they could make sure
it was not you
who had done the damage.

*

Alison Seevak’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Sun, Literary Mama and Atlanta Review. She lives in Northern California.

Three Poems by Nancy Huggett

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Wake Me in a Silly Stupid Way
(our daughter’s request, post-stroke, most mornings)

My husband is a pirate,
a patch, a breach of laughter
in the morning. Stealing
our daughter’s memory
of what she’s lost
from her waking eyes
so what remains is this ocean
of love that amuses. He steers
the stolen ship of what might have been
around the rocks, through shark-infested
waters that roil when her brain recoils
at sound and wobbly stairs and boundaries
not set by her—the flash and flare
of fists that harm the ones she loves,
the contrition that plunders her days.
He peg-legs in and pulls a parrot
from his pocket, feathers ruffed
from the climb upstairs, squawking
in some raucous rum-punched tenor,
jigging with the sunlight as it streaks
across the pine planks of her bedroom floor.
Other days he’s a wizard in a pointy hat
or a jester with a bell, or his own sweet
grinning goofy self that he magics
from yesterday’s debacle or last
night’s unkempt sleep. He saves her
daily from her own laments.
Switch-baits regrets for buried
treasure—this day and all its charms.

*

When our daughter with Down syndrome is diagnosed
with a rare neurodegenerative disease, I think of the skunk
after Maggie Smith

who, three nights in a row,
woke us with the burning sulphureous sting
of a stink and I ran around closing windows.
Like all those midnight runs to the ER
when our daughter kept having “fainting spells”
and turned blue. Then someone told me

it takes almost two weeks for a skunk
to refill their glands after spraying,
that if it happens back to back to back
you’re dealing with a bigger problem.

*

I Believe in the Night: A Caregiver’s Credo
(lines from Rilke, Book of Monastic Life I, 11)

I believe in the night, creator
of mirrors and monsters,

and in the stars, dead now
but dangling direction.

I believe in shadow’s
embrace. Dusky lover

of all the nations of my heart—
their bicker of sadness,

canticles of delight. I believe
in unfinished hems, threads

trailing through dark,
thin ribbons of fiddle

for fingers searching,
rosaries lost long ago

in the backwoods of hope
where brambles catch

starlight, glimmer like fireflies
always moving. I believe

in the dirt, in cicadas’
vast slumber,

the emergence of lovers,
bulbs, dew worms inching

refuse into friable loam.
I believe in the soil—

that darkness can make you sing.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, Poetry Northwest, SWIMM, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.

The Beech Tree by Heather Hallberg Yanda

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The Beech Tree

For weeks, all the trees on
Lockwood Road prepared
for absence. Now, in late
Autumn, they found it.  I

walk through a sepia
photograph.  Today
I think of my father —
my dad, my daddy — who

is fragile, who stumbles
easily.  For weeks, I
have felt his spirit, his
warmth fall away.  I have

walked this road many times
with him: every turned leaf
meant naming maples, ash,
dogwood. Now every rut

in the road is a new
chance to fall. I can still
hear his footfalls, his laugh.
Here, in the grief

before the grief, all is
vulnerable, a word
from the Latin, meaning
to wound.  Here, where Finley’s

fence opens to this
meadow, a beech tree I
never noticed still grasps
its bright leaves.  It teaches

what my dad taught: to stand
tall, and when it is time
to let everything go,
to let everything go.

*

Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches in the English Department at Alfred University, in the hills of upstate New York. After many years of sending poems out, her work has been published in such journals as Barely South Review, Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, and (forthcoming) in The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities. In the midst of the pandemic, her first collection of poems, Late Summer’s Origami, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. She is currently seeking a publisher for her second collection, What the Stones Borrowed.

To a Mother I Know by Alison Luterman

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To a Mother I Know

I have seen you lift
the whole car of your pain
and hold it above your head
with trembling arms.

Seen you bench-press
that two-ton rusted hulk aloft
for eighteen years
so that your daughter

could play in the open air
creating whole worlds, innocent
of the superhuman effort
you were making

to keep the weight
off her. It happens all the time,
mothers do this, they hoist
the unbearable and they bear it,

but witnessing you achieve
the impossible, breaks
something in me. Not
my heart, but the ice sheath

around it. I think
of my own mother, of course,
and how valiant her effort
at keeping me apart

from her suffering, though you can’t
really keep a daughter apart,
we are too much entwined
in one long umbilicus

reaching down
the generations like tree vines.
And this is what’s
the matter, mater, mother

of all truths: the weight
of what we try to carry
for each other will never
be fully known.

*

Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net

Four Poems by Whitney Waters

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Extraterrestrial

June bugs swarm the grass like a platoon
of drunk helicopters. Metallic jade,
oil slick. When their bodies ricochet
from my forehead, my chest, they fly
on as if we didn’t touch, as if one being
is the same as the next, all one swirling
cacophony. Alien ship, alien skin.
How unburdened they are
in flight. Behind the wing
of my shoulder, a recurring pinch, knife
that slices clean to the other side
some days. My only relief is for my love
to dig his thumb into the edge of the blade,
one pain alleviating the other. The muscle’s slide
and recoil. How badly we want to be pressed
into where it most hurts.
                                               Most days I cry
at little things— the Olympics, podcasts,
pop songs, the fact that night comes
on earlier and earlier as August closes.
I watch the women’s marathon—hours
of arms and limbs shimmering with effort
and elation—and when one woman bursts
forth in the last minute, dodges
the elbow, breaks the tape, I think
this is what it means to disregard
pain for flight, and I’m all teary as if
I’m the one who’s won something. Here
is my body— common, earthbound.
This world is abundant in disaster.
Drape me in iridescence. Make me that green.

*

Letter to the Daughter I Don’t Have

I don’t want you afraid of this world. I don’t want you to fear men or copperhead bites or AK 47s or dark parking garages or cancer. I don’t want you careful. I want the bad things of the world to ricochet off you like you’re made of steel. I don’t want you made of steel. I want you riverwater. I want you sunny 70 degree days. I want you oceans and orcas and hawksbill turtles and red wolves. I want you feeding the sea turtles salad. I want you reveling fresh-picked blackberries. I want you swimming through coral reefs and florescent blue fish. Did you know more than 90% of coral reefs are expected to die in my lifetime? I want you to call out of work to watch ducks dive and reemerge. I want you to quit your job. I want you to have truly great sex. I don’t want you to know you’ll never exist. That you had a chance to exist, but I eliminated it. Or how many other animals soon won’t exist. This is not an apology. Forgive me. I don’t want you small and fragile. I don’t want you suckling or tottering. I don’t want the bulbous belly, my skin pulled taught over your own. The morning sickness. My insides tearing open. The sleepless nights. The heavy breasts. I like my breasts as they are, small pale slopes. I want you to know you have a name, a secret name I call you in my head. And perhaps, I want you to tell me that it isn’t scary not to exist. That it’s not dark there.

*

My mother would have loved feeding you her deviled eggs

and you would have loved eating them— southern style,
insides milky buttercups sprinkled with paprika, cradled
in her handmade blue ceramic platter— how proud

she was of that platter, how it matched her kitchen.
She would have delighted at how many you scarfed down,
would send you home with all the leftovers—

potato cheese casserole, country ham and biscuits, asked
what can I fix you and you sure you had enough? She’d refill
your glass with anything you wanted, sweet tea,

whiskey, wine. My mother would have loved your appetite
for southern cooking, for butter and meat, everything her daughter
did not would not touch. She would not have to ask what can I make

that you’ll eat, because you would gladly eat everything
she heaped on your plate. She would have said so tall
so handsome those shoulders why didn’t you bring

this one home sooner? Sooner—the word that echoes back
at me, and I want to answer, longer. Let’s stay out here longer—
we’ll sit on the back porch in the suspended evening,

the hummingbirds will sip sweet nectar, the magnolias
will bloom, the September sky will be blameless.
My plate, still full. I’ve asked for too much.

*

Resourceful Woman

         She is also just a very good, plain, resourceful woman.
         – Sylvia Plath on “Lady Lazarus”

My mother was on the cusp
of forty, and I was ten when
I found her lying stiff
on the bed in the light
of the lampshade,
her featureless face, fine-lined, teeth
straight and full of fillings, vomit-stained
white bowl and bottle of pills
on the nightstand, her chest, rounded
and hard as a seashell—

I did not call
anyone.

I snapped shut,
crept back down
the carpeted stairs.
My father called her sister
and I overheard
an accident.

There was no spectacle,
just murmurings. I’m certain
he never knew I knew.

How many times had it been?

Married to her high school sweetheart,
the quarterback, did she feel trapped
as pearls clasped around her slender
neck? The girl in her yearbook,
a smiling, identical woman
in a cheerleading uniform.

She didn’t manage it—

not that time. And two decades later,
I’m sure it was an accident
of the heart. The machine that forgot
to beat for her. She was asleep and stayed
that way. This time, she meant to sleep.
No theatrics. No comeback.

*

Whitney Waters is a poet and educator living in Asheville, NC. She teaches writing at Western Carolina University and teaches workshops through the Great Smokies Writing Program. Her poems have been published in Penumbra, The Shore, About Place Journal, Twelve Mile Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. You can find her on Instagram @whitneywaters.poet.

Two Poems by Melissa Surrette

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Walking a chair home from the Clark Community Thrift Store

One hypotenuse across
the Saint Peter’s parking lot
was the trip from our apartment
to the thrift store that once
was Monihan’s Pharmacy.
“Have you seen that chair
they have over there?”
My dad swooned on our
trip a few blocks beyond
to Tedeschi’s market
“I’m gonna ask to sit in it.”

Dad oscillates from his couch-
made-bed to a cracked dining
chair to watch the news.
In secondhand socks and shoes,
he skips at the sight of
weighty wooden
slabs for arms (3ft. x 3ft)
sandwiching slightly scratchy cushions,
bistre brown—color of my hair.
Dad’s perfection, kept at bay
“If only I had forty bucks,” he’d say.

“How much do you have?”
Danielle asks.
“I’ll do twenty-five,
if you do fifteen.”

Comfy chair, but more so
comforting to fulfill
Dad’s humble indulgence.
Two teens with summer
jobs and City money.
A flutter from diaphragm
to the back of my nose
when I imagine him in
a tweed-upholstered throne.

“I need a break,”
I sigh to Danielle
and rub blood back into
my throbbing fingers
a few parking spaces
from the sidewalk.

“Twenty bucks and I’ll take
that anywhere you want,”
says a truck driver on Main street.
We wave him off,
pick up our cargo.

“You go girls!” from the woman
who sits at the bus stop, but
never boards. She watches
us shuffle down a mulched slope
and past three doorways.

“For me?” asks my dad
as he helps us labor
down landing stairs
his considerable chair.

*

Two-player Rummy with Mom

A deck split in half
a riffle shuffle
a bridging back together.

Soap opera marathon on
The bureau mounted TV. Mountain
Dew bottle sits on the plastic
tote bucket made side table

to Mom’s king size bed set:
two twin box springs under a
mattress for one.
On her bed, she sits sidesaddle.

I sit on my left ankle. Right leg
dangles, not yet long enough
to touch the rose and cream
rug. Seven cards dealt per person

on Merlot sheets pulled
and tucked taut between
my knee and where she sits
facing me.

Her Five-Star spiral notebook
sits open beside us. She keeps
score between neat lists in
blue ink, strickenthrough to-dos:

Laundromat: Four basketball
jerseys for this week’s game
Family physicals: 3 youngest Thursday,
4 middles Friday.
Food pantry Wednesday:
Request Parmalat milk.
Cash Welfare checks: Stop
by housing authority afterward

*

Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, Melissa Surrette is currently a PhD student at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) engaging in and researching teacher education. Before that, she earned her Master of Arts in Teaching at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She has contributed chapters to edited volumes such as Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense: Writing a New History and in the Demystifying Social Justice Education book series. Melissa has also co-authored a forthcoming article in the “International Review of Qualitative Research”. Melissa is a member of the Poem Works poetry group as well as the Round Table Poetry Workshop.

Dad Says His Gravestone Will Say He Did What He Had to Do by Charlotte Maiorana

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Dad Says His Gravestone Will Say He Did What He Had to Do

He hates seeing other people’s
vacation photos. Cobblestones,
small plates, good for them.

If their luggage was lost
for three days or they got sick
from street vendors then good.

He’s trying to get to the beach
but the wheelchair won’t fit
in the trunk.

Let the Mustang run her engine
from time to time, he says he doesn’t
want to feel his hip when he runs.

You know, he hopes they aren’t going
to the hospital again. Before the icy
commute he used a hair dryer on the pipes

made sure they didn’t freeze. Mom
thawed dinner when she could still stand
long enough to open the door.

Now every day he’s up at four to check
her CPAP machine; needing sleep less
than needing worry.

He doesn’t want to deal with a barbeque
so he doesn’t grow tomatoes anymore.
Leaves the piano open, plays Celluloid Heroes

after the closing bell, sometimes he thinks
about digging through boxes in the garage
to bring the old accordion out,

hang grandpa’s wedding photo on the wall.
He’s been calling all afternoon.
I put the knife down.

*

Charlotte Maiorana is an American-Italian writer and mother of two young boys. She is a current MFA student at Randolph College and lives in her hometown of Staten Island, New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal, Querencia Press, The Rumen, and elsewhere. You can find her at charlottemaiorana.substack.com and @charlotteccm on Instagram.

Admission by Livia Meneghin

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Admission

The mourning doves returned this May. Despite
last summer’s shooing & ammonium poured

onto the terrace floor. Despite a ramshackle
bicycle as the only shelter to roost beneath.

They first came the year our home was vacated.
I went north. My sister went south. My mother,

away in her own way, tended to her dying
parents a ten minute drive down the Bronx River.

I admit, I was angry with my mother for leaving
our apartment. The words taste of guilt

because so had I. She chose to stay in her
childhood home instead—where her parents,

one at a time, over countless sleepless nights
& all the love a daughter could give, left her.

When my mother returned, the doves joined her,
knowing she would admit them a nest. Now,

two eggs await life in a shallow swirl of twigs
& dry leaves. We, her daughters, build lives

elsewhere, slowly learn to give her permission
to grieve how she needs, & imagine—

she does not wish to disturb the birds
on the terrace, so she looks out the window, hoping

they will come into view.

*

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Reads Editor. She has won fellowships and awards from Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, the Writers’ Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing. She is a cancer survivor.

Dear Daughter, by Julie Weiss

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Dear Daughter,

I see you in the store, rummaging
through a display of tacky hibiscus
hairclips, our town´s new fad
among fourth graders. You ask me
which color bedazzles above
all the rest. I was nine once, too.
I know you want to buy the one
that will garner the most compliments
on the playground, or a nod from a girl
who swatted you out of her path
like a delirious September wasp.
I know the stings you´ll bring home
again and again, deem unbearable.
I see you, shushing me when I speak
too loudly in the language everyone
in Spain is trying to learn. Tweaking
your American accent in English class
to sound like your friends. I know
all the gifts you´ll toss in your closet,
the smile you´ll wipe off your cheeks
like a ruby red lipstick print
when I drop you off half a block
from the school gate. At your age
I, too, tried on seven different attitudes
a week, all of them as becoming
as an elephant beetle. I see the gluten-thick
birthday cakes you can´t taste,
the gapes when you mention your two
moms. I know how you regard your
differences—a weird gang of gargoyles
marring an otherwise beautiful garden.
I want to shout, “You´re wrong!”
Dear daughter, slam the fads
on the counter and tornado away. Wild
your hair into a style that will drop
this decade´s jaw. Catwalk through town
in a hodgepodge, expletives be damned.
Cartwheel past the gatekeepers like
a carnival act. Learn the word for perfection
in 7000 different languages.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Originally from California, she lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Two Poems by Elizabeth S. Wolf

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Shattered

Coming home from college,
crouched down on the kitchen floor,
she wouldn’t couldn’t look me in the eye
she wouldn’t couldn’t tell me why
her blanket was a tangled bundle stained with vomit
but I knew, a woman knows, a mother doesn’t want to
so I asked, did someone try to hurt you and then
said what I really meant, did someone try to rape you
and she nodded, head averted looking down
         he was choking me
                  but it stopped when I threw up
and she whispered no one believed and Andi
blamed me for ruining her goodbye party and I
guess I had it coming since I was just starting to
feel kind of good about myself and I felt pretty
and I was having fun and I guess I went too far
and a mother’s heart sinks
bile rising up your throat
because this shouldn’t still be happening
and I know that late-teen type of cocky
that heady joy of looking good
that tastes almost like tossing back
a shot of pure verve— that rush
of coming into your own self—
a righteous confidence that
never comes back the same
once the spell is broken.

* 

At Seventeen

I borrowed my mother’s car, a cherry red Buick Skylark
circa 1971. It was the first anniversary of my father’s death
but instead of demurely lighting a Yahrzeit candle I took off
to see a boy, a hot boy, a rad boy, a bit-of-a-dangerous
bad boy, who was staying with friends; we had all scattered
when the halfway house for troubled teens suddenly totally
closed. We met up and headed out into a steamy summer night.
He broke into a stacked rack of mailboxes, looking for checks;
broke into a holy Catholic church, seeking silver and gold;
broke into me, brusque with lust; recklessly ran a red light
and smashed the car, high-style bumper and driver-side doors
dented and scratched, stolid white upholstery stained by
splotches of blood. I waited for sunrise to return the keys;
my mother rolled over in her empty bed and asked me to
leave. Later the doctor stitching me up would laugh:
Tell your boyfriend to be more careful next time.
For years after I lit a commemorative candle, a tall taper
stuck in the graceful green neck of an empty bottle, dripping
wax melting and merging, colors converging, layers emerging
year after year like the rings of a tree, latewood circling
spring growth, rising high above riddles of sealing or healing.

*

Elizabeth S. Wolf has published 5 books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a Rattle prizewinner. Rattle Summer 2022 featured her project with Prisoner Express. In 2023 Elizabeth taped readings at the White House, Supreme Court, and US Capitol with The Scheherazade Project. In 2024 her work landed on the moon with the Lunar Codex. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/author/esw

For My Daughter, on Her First Birthday by Svetlana Litvinchuk

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For My Daughter, on Her First Birthday

When my baby was born she had
an extra short umbilical cord

we were extra connected extra close
the doctor’s only choices were to

either cut it immediately or to place her
back in my belly where she could

drink milk from the starry inside
every day I think about how to do that

how it would have been

we could develop our own language
knock twice for yes and once for no

I would describe everything so she
wouldn’t miss a thing. I wouldn’t tell her

about the warplanes flying overhead or
about the ice caps melting around us

I could digest all the world’s pain
for her and let only the sugar pass

when the time comes for her wedding
I can dance on my husband’s feet

the way only daughters do and when
she knocks twice for “I Do”

I will cry tears of joy, my waters
breaking, causing a great flood

*

Svetlana Litvinchuk is a permaculturist who holds BAs from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Apocalypse Confidential, Littoral Magazine, Black Coffee Review, Eunoia Review, Big Windows Review, and Longhouse Press. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now lives with her husband and daughter on their farm in the Arkansas Ozarks.

Two Poems by Katey Funderburgh

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Babycake

Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds
on the day she brought me home to no one but herself.
Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter
with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw
each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside
her inside her mother who died on purpose before
the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept
against her until the mirage left her eyelids,
until she started making the coffee again.
Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete
into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting
a barn where once there stood nothing but a field and
my mother’s heatvisions of horses we would feed
every morning. This is what saved her— not the bedsheets
I changed but the buckets of grain and hot water
steaming in each stall. She put me in a saddle
when I was still diapered. You were already burrowed
at my spinal center, watching how we almost broke
the tether, severed and sighed in the grass between
the teeth of our horses— the heads always growing back,
the shed skin always returning its need to blink us
back open into ourselves, every daughter
mixing the batter with her hands. I do, she does,
she did, you will— worry it’s not enough.

*

Sappho at the Gay Bar

Here, the Gods are kin to ink on a girl’s arm.
Love, I hear your voice on their tongues.
They print fauna on their bodies. Flora
speaks between fingers

of thin-skinned girls who ask about you.
I have read what remains of us. The same
fire under my skin, the same anger.
I am taught sin.

Here, they are named of me.
Their unmade beds, their grass-gentle hands—
they hold my undead body.
Body I wrote

to worship you, yet here we breathe, among them—

*

Katey Funderburgh is an emerging poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry student at George Mason University, where she is also a reader for phoebe and SoToSpeak literary journals, as well as for Poetry Daily. Katey’s earlier work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, samfiftyfour, and Jet Fuel Review, among others. When she isn’t toiling over poems, Katey can be found laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle.

Daddy’s Girl by Julie Benesh

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DADDY’S GIRL

I wanted to run away
with my mother.
She and I could date
around, compare (love)
notes, and always
have each other.

But she and my father
stayed together.
I grew up, went to college,
got married. Since her death

we’ve grown apart. The world
has changed yet part of me
is stuck at 26, the age
I was when I lost her.

I monitored my female body
for mother’s ailments: glaucoma,
arthritis, metastatic tumors,
but I got instead his bad skin
and silent reflux, his work anxiety,
things of his I’d once blamed
on alcohol and cigarettes
that I eschewed.

My father lived another 18 years.
One time with relatives, we looked
at each other and knew we’d both
had enough of the chatter.
and fled like adolescents.

With my rival and nemesis
I had more in common
than I knew, but why
was I surprised?

We had
the same
great love.

*

Julie Benesh (juliebenesh.com) authored the chapbook ABOUT TIME from Cathexis Northwest Press. She published work in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program and recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her full-length poetry collection, INITIAL CONDITIONS, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press.

Poem by Melody Wilson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Doctrine of the Kite

It floats from my fingertips—
a cathedral of rice paper
and balsa.
“Lighter than air,” Daddy said,
sipped his beer,
tapped ash from his cigar.

He said gold pounded thin enough
would cover the earth; meat should
never be wrapped in foil.
The number three always brings bad luck.

Morning was crowded with kites:
boxes, diamonds, deltas.
Children pelted the playground,
paper whiffling, tails flowing,
they released the keels
trusted in speed and skill.
Lines sang through sweaty hands.

Six toed cats are charmed, he said,
and Joshua trees can move.
Man and God are forever
locked in duel.

I held the kite above my head that day
reciting everything he said.
It quivered once,
twice, then rose
and rose.
The string pulling away
from the spool.

*

Melody Wilson lives and teaches near Portland, Oregon. She has one Academy of American Poets Award, and several smaller awards including a 2020 Kay Snow award. Her work has appeared in The Portland Review, Visions International, and Triggerfish Critical Review.