I judge from my Geography Volcanoes nearer here — Emily Dickinson
I remember the clatter my mother’s pressure cooker made on winter afternoons, how it spat steam, played a tune. Sometimes she sang along. Once, the gauge shot off, embedding like a bullet in the ceiling. She just stood there, gazing, as green goo geysered, slight smile on her lips. My mother loved her pot. I’d even say she was inspired by its potential, and her own. She knew volcanos can be still for years, though magma brews beneath. Maybe she sensed they were alike, she and this pot, that she could capture the force of the words that fueled her, the ones she muttered under her breath all day in two languages. She trained me to be her surrogate, to believe my words had heft, taught me to embrace the danger, learn the craft of channeling all the rich profusion that nascent power might allow.
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Worm Farm
Near the end, you knew that you were dying, though we never spoke of it, just went on shopping for new socks and the special tidbits you loved to snack on, though you had no more than four teeth left to chew that crusty bread, the Porterhouse we cut for you in ever-smaller bits. You went on shredding peels and scraps to fertilize your Meyer lemon and pomegranate trees, spoke to the red wrigglers in your farm as though they were your pets. “I can’t die,” you said, just a week before you did. “What would happen to my worms?”
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Ambivalence
Memory is / the past reversed — Catherine Bowman, “Duende”
When I mouthed off, defiant in the face of my father’s sudden rage, he used to say “No one will ever love you but your parents.” He said it ruefully, so I knew he’d heard it many times when he was young. He complained his mother held him back. She wouldn’t let him work as the apprentice to a veterinarian or train to be a jockey because they wouldn’t feed him Kosher food. He didn’t speak to her for years. But I had to wonder what he meant by “love,” if it was love he felt when he hit me with his belt, claiming all the while it hurt him more than me.
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I have lived in many houses
but seldom think of them–except for the row-house on Stirling Street, 3 bedrooms, a garage, and basement, where laundry hung indoors all winter on makeshift lines in the dark unfinished basement, haunt of many nightmares, prison and sanctuary. I remember noisy radiators, hyperactive poltergeists, rust-red brick exterior, steep flights of concrete stairs, black and white tile in the bathroom, errant splotch of paint marring the chessboard pattern of the floor. Neighbors like monarchs in their lawn chairs watched every car and truck dodge dogs and children, balls badly thrown. I sold it to an immigrant. Like almost everyone who lived there, my parents were children of immigrants. All of them longed for their community, but scarred beyond repair, turned on each other. I was glad to leave that place, yet it’s still the house I always think of when I think of home.
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Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.
