Mother’s Day

         “I am not a mother, and I don’t have one.”
               Posted on Facebook on Mother’s Day

One can choose, or be fated, not to be
a mother. But every woman alive
must be a daughter. Surely she meant
that her mother is dead. One can lose
a mother, but not lose her.
From what she’s shared, I see she’s kept
her mother’s story, a family heirloom.
Her mother’s spirit, sweet and sour, a taste
she’s beginning to acquire, a ghost she tries
to summon or banish at will.

And here’s the corollary she might have said:
Though I’m a daughter, I don’t have one.
So the long line of daughters ends here,
with her. And her shadow daughter—
does she dream she would braid and brush
her hair, watch with trepidation her body
grow and change, deflect with love and grief
the arrows her daughter slings at the flesh that bore her?
Grown, would her daughter speak with her
every day, or never? Idle thoughts,
fantasies drifting and changing like clouds,
weather completely under her control.

Not like the hard-edged memories
of her mother. You cannot erase a mother.
You cannot divorce her, though you may
separate with amity or enmity. Still,
she’s under your skin, in your DNA,
she’s set up a junkyard or castle in your mind.
Her words or voice may spill from your mouth.
In your body her fragile bones may break.

*

Mary Makofske’s latest books are No Angels (Kelsay, 2023), The Gambler’s Daughter (The Orchard Street Press, 2022); World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017); and Traction (Ashland, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. Her poems have appeared in more than 70 journals including Poetry East, American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Glassworks, Louisville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and in 22 anthologies. She has received first prizes in poetry from Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, Littoral Press Broadside Contest, Lullwater Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Quiet Diamonds, The Ledge, and Cumberland Poetry Review. marymakofske.com