1 It’s a woman’s crowning glory, Mother said, and she brushed my hair a hundred strokes at night, rolled it in rags so my long curls would bounce below the barrettes, wound them around her finger each morning. She pulled so hard my eyes watered. I hacked each curl off with kitchen shears when I turned twelve.
2 “Don’t ever cut it,” he said, and his hands were tender beside my face, then drifted through, beyond. Mother’s mantra became my own. I brushed until it gleamed. Once he washed it for me like men do in Hallmark films. His fingers tangled, but I didn’t cry since women never cry in scenes like that.
3 The doctor said it would fall out, but the clumps in the shower drain startled me. I went to a salon and told the girl to cut it off, right down to the scalp. She cried and I cried and she wouldn’t let me pay.
My poem “What I Picked for the Journey” was published today by the wonderful Writing in a Woman’s Voice. My thanks to editor Beate Sigriddaughter.
What I Picked for the Journey
A strong walking stick that fits my grasp. Oatmeal raisin cookies. A few favorite poems. A heart-shaped pebble for my pocket.
I’ll leave on a day that promises sun and breeze and animal-shaped clouds. I’ll find wild blueberries and spring water pure as a child’s wonder.
I’ll pass the hours remembering forsythia in April, the softness of a baby’s skin, campfires, the smell of bread fresh from the oven. I’ll sleep where the milky way tumbles through the night sky and trees whisper to the wind.
The first of 3 poems published today in the wonderful Voice-Virtual. My thanks to editor Jim Lewis.
Long walks and sunshine. Not the mileage I used to clock nor the speed, but birdsong and daffodils I’d have missed before. An outing with granddaughters, peeking into their lives and loves, their favorite band (loud) and the in spot for burgers and fries. The quiet, driving home. Dinner with friends, repeating tales decades old, tsking at AI, cryptocurrency, Tik Tok, X. Evenings of old sweatshirts and slippers takeout and TV, my dog chasing rabbits in his sleep.
Silver Birch Press published this poem today in their “Mothers” series. My thanks to Melanie, the Silver Birch Editor.
Thirteen Ways of LookIng at My Mother-in-Law After Wallace Stevens
An Arkansas farm woman, Boby loves Sunday drives after church to see what folks are planting and to tidy up the family graves.
In spring, when the fields are ripe with fresh manure, Boby takes a deep breath. “Smells like money,” she says.
Honesty is her virtue. She told me once “You’re not exactly what we hoped for.”
Boby has no use for corsages. “Give me something I can put in the ground.“ She has eight flowerbeds— lilies, gardenias, azaleas, roses.
Each granddaughter and great-grand has a quilt pieced from a lifetime of scraps— prints, plaids, ginghams and a bit of lace. “They look pretty good from the road,” she says.
Her mother lived on the next farm over, her uncles just beyond, ripples of family for a thousand acres, bickering, loving, gossiping, mourning.
Boby buried two husbands. The first was hers for a quarter century. The second just four years, “a bonus” she said after forty years a widow.
We spend fall weekends shelling wash tubs of pecans—300 pounds some years—our fingers raw and stained dark as the delta loam.
Always a stray underfoot—cat or mongrel dog. They show up on her doorstep. She shrugs and takes them in. The cats are all called Katie.
She played piano at church as the congregation dwindled to a half-dozen stooped, gray forms. She never cared much for the preacher.
When she turned 90, Boby announced she’d give up driving October first. Took us awhile to figure out her birthday was the 6th, and she knew she’d flunk the eye test.
She killed a rabid skunk in a neighbor’s driveway with the shotgun she keeps under the bed. “Sorry I can’t stay to visit,” she told her friend. “I’ve got a cake in the oven.”
Now 96, she lives alone, as bent, stubborn and fragile as wisteria, children scattered from acreage bought a century ago. No money in farming these days. “They’ll carry me away from here in a pine box,” she says.
First published in Third Wednesday Poetry Journal.
I’ll be part of a Zoom poetry reading with a grand list of poets on Saturday, July 20 at 2pm MST. I hope you can join us. Details about how to register are at the bottom of the poster.
The third poem published in the wonderful Rusty Truck this week.
Harbor Woman
She takes them in — the peddler, minstrel, gypsy. Townsfolk speak in wanton whispers, how she beds each one. They rebuke their budding daughters who mime her loose-hipped stroll. Addled by her lustered hair, full lips, boys are whipped for where their hands go in the night. But the same wives who beat their sons, go in darkness for her herbs so they will bleed again. Men, lured by musk and breasts that push beneath her shawl, dream her while astride those dowdy wives, conjure her cries in their grinding. Beside her hearth, sojourners tell of war and greed and mutiny, of realms where she could dance for kings, wear silks, call maids to brush her hair. They tempt her to break free, but she knows her place is here, knows she is the wellspring of sweet water for parched village tongues.
Early morning on the wharf, sharing a thermos with Juan Pablo. He’s brown and scuffed as old boots, tough like that too, eyes squinted with age and sun. He knows the ocean like his woman’s face, reads stars, wind, waves, like poems. He’s mending a net, hands stiff and scarred, sorting gnarls and frays, ash falling from a Camel held square between his teeth. A tourist interrupts, though no one’s talking, wants to hire the boat to fish tarpon. Juan Pablo grunts and nods toward a salt-soaked sign with hourly rates. The guy says he’ll be back with his wife and kid. Juan Pablo watches him stride toward a hotel, New York cadence out of step with the lap of water on pilings. He snorts, then gathers up the net, half done, stands with a stumble to favor his bum knee. He jerks his head toward the seamless join of sea and sky. C’mon, he says, taking the stub of Camel and grinding it under his heel. That cabrón can hire another boat.
