I like the idea of poems being in conversation with one another. Over the past couple of weeks, there have been some wonderful poems about mothers and women and the cycles that women go through.
had a prompt about writing desire and responded with a poem titled “Day One,” which sparked a conversation about the things our mothers never prepared us for and that inspired this wonderful poem by titled “Brace Yourself.” My poem this week is essence an extension of the conversation.The one person in the world I never wanted to be like was my mother. Yet, the older I get the more often I hear words coming out of my mouth that sound exactly like her. Or I make a gesture that she would make. She is also the source of my beliefs about what the world should be, about the importance of public education, that no one should ever be left out. And she fought for those things, in Dallas, Texas, where it wasn’t always very popular.
In the 1970s she wore her ERA bracelet each day. One of the heartaches of 2016 was that she didn’t get to see a woman elected president of the United States. She’s celebrating her ninety-third birthday in a couple of weeks. She’s one of the reasons I grew up with rights I have. I’ll be damned if I’ll give those up.
“The Mirror,”1 however, is about those communalities we just can’t seem to get away from, about being a teenager when being like your mother seems like one of the worst things in the world.
The Mirror
Boys dipped
my mother’s hair in ink wells.
She wore it long then,
in two braids of copper-blond.
Those same boys’ sons
called me “Pickle.”
When my red black death
smeared itself across
white panties, she said,
I was the same age as you—
the unspoken threat I fought,
my breasts straining
the cotton lace of my
blue training bra.
I try to imagine my mother
at thirteen, living in Homestead,
dungarees rolled to reveal
pale calves,
blouse knotted at the waist,
exposing a half-inch
of never sunburnt flesh.
The sailors whistled
when they walked past our fence.
I try to imagine her then
but see only myself at that age,
mowing the front lawn in my
bikini. Like her, I discover
wads of tissue in all
my coat pockets. I own
her breasts,
the shuffle of her feet,
that unsteady need to please, all her
silent screams.
“The Mirror” first appeared in Red River Review in August 2004.
‘that unsteady need to please, all her
silent screams.’ 👌
Oh wow, well this one stopped me in my tracks.