I Dream of Meeting My Family at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1982
—after Geffrey Davis
Easy to spot: three of the four of us wearing matching tube socks,
pulled to the knee, white, with three blue stripes at the top,
and our sockless mother’s tan legs. How dearly
I want to press a wad of money into my mother’s palm.
Back home a cupboard of canned corn and tomatoes mimics
a full pantry. The silverware pretends to be silver.
It must have taken every last coin to hobble
to the fair, only to be knee-capped by the price
of each buttered corn on the cob, each bumper car, each ease
of thirst. I know my nine-year-old self yearns to catapult
the rubber frogs into the floating lily pads, but does not ask.
By nightfall, mom has starved herself all day, steered us to
every last free exhibit, then surprises us with four tickets
to the ferris wheel. My younger self cannot
see the top of the monster wheel, cannot bear dangling
in sky. The wheel looms larger than a skyscraper,
as if it could fall from its axle, roll through Tennessee
and Kentucky. How much weight can an axis take?
In the dream, I realize why I’m there:
to hold that little girl’s hand, to ensure
for once in my mother’s too-short life,
she’s 165 feet high, floating like Lois Lane
with Superman, wind in her face, marveling
in the dark at the kaleidoscope of light.
Notes: In 1982, The Giant Wheel at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, was the largest ferris wheel operating in the world at that time. It was 165 feet high and had the capacity of 240 passengers in 40 6-person gondolas.
*
Where the Flowers Have No Names
In my hometown, the highway billboard reads
If You Can’t Read, We Can Help
Maybe. It feels out of reach, doesn’t it?
Like if you know the right someone.
My grandmother kept her native words
tucked in her bra like folded cash.
Which is to say I was not taught the names
of things. No matter the color,
a flower was simply flou-wah,
anything reptilian with legs was liz-ahd,
and any passing vehicle was a cah.
The compartment of her brain for specificity
lay paralyzed in the black basement of her childhood,
the door sealed so tightly that when the cashier
asked for the name of girl-me in the shopping cart,
my grandmother said I call her dee-yah.
She swaddled me, fleshy arms to pillowy bosom,
kissed a bushel and a peck of kisses.
Does it matter that I still don’t know the names
of the purple flowers on the vines outside that 2-bed,
1-bath cinderblock in which we all lived?
If You Need A Hug, I Can Help.
*
Not Another Poem About Flowers
Poor college student, I bussed to a bridal shower
of Harvard girls who brought gifts like a coffee-table
Book of Flowers. My blue-collar special stood alone:
a cakepan, spatulas, decorating tubes and tips
wrapped together inside a Rubbermaid cake-keeper.
My mother didn’t like flowers either. Bouquet
of Brief Beauty Before Wilt-Death. Allergy
Bouquet. Bouquet of Pet Killers. Bouquet
of You-Could-Have-Fed-the-Children. I’d rather
a bouquet of cash or a fresh bunch of rainbow
chard, or a bowl of arugula.
In our cash-strapped 20s, my lover greeted
me with a napkin surprise—leftover bits
of her last meal. I was never that hungry
but appreciated pressing against her jeans—
her rough car keys, tube of Chapstick, pocket knife,
and her wallet-ass. We’re upscale now.
When I arrive at baggage claim after COVID-fasting
across the country, roll my luggage past
the greeters with red roses and pink carnations
and step into the passenger seat of her car,
she places two steel bowls in my lap—
blanched organic broccoli, plump orange slices—
with a bouquet of utensils to unwrap.
*
Danielle Lemay is a poet and a scientist. She was Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Contest Winner and a Patricia Cleary Miller Award Finalist at New Letters. Her poetry has appeared in Boulevard, Poetry South, On the Seawall, ONE ART, and many other journals. More at DanielleLemay.com