Nutmeg and Mace

Spices were currency once.
Rent paid in peppercorns.

Can my dishes, so curried they amber the plates
with stains after, ensure the guests I serve stay?

No, you feed guests so they may have strength
to continue the journey away.

A good mother feeds a child so she’ll grow 
large, too large for the house and leave.

There’s no returning to the cinnamon- 
toast–scented school mornings.

[… continue reading “Nutmeg and Mace” as well as an interview with Rose McLarney (poetry ’10) at New England Review.]

Tunnels

Opening

O tunnels! Mysterious and misunderstood. We don’t love you for your very own selves. We only love you for what you do for us, the way you get us from Point A to Point B. You connect the past to the future. But you are mere means to an end, a place we visit only to escape.

BOrn

The birth canal is the first tunnel. It prepares us for the ones that come after. From the darkness there arises an inchoate and intuitive sense of destination, a drive, without understanding of what awaits. We can only go forward, into the bright unknown. The future is unimaginable.

When I was born, the mothers were routinely given drugs that made them sleep through delivery. In expulsion, the mother gives life. This is her job: to hold her child close and then to push her out.

[… continue reading at Atticus Review.]

New Ars Poetica

This poem won’t sing on the sidewalk for dollar bills
or take penicillin; it’s disabled its airbags
and gone off the grid,

it’s allowing its id to have a say. This poem is not
your cure, sop, balm, or oasis of calm
in the world’s shitstorm.

[… continue reading at Blackbird.]

Eye of the Storm: Interlude in the Penultimate Space

Years before meeting my father, my mother had another husband. But because that husband, the first one, amounted to no more than a blip on the radar of my mother’s life (18 months to be precise), and because my mother and father will be celebrating their 44th wedding anniversary this spring, the existence of this mysterious first husband is now of little concern.

There was a time, however, when I was consumed by this information. I was five, and I had suddenly discovered a photo album full of wedding pictures from that short-lived marriage in the back of the coat closet in my childhood home. While photographs of my own parents’ marriage decorated the walls of our living room, the ones from that first marriage had been relegated to the darker recesses of the house. And though I can no longer remember the particulars about how I came to discover in the first place that my mother had been married before (did she tell me before I discovered the photographs, or had I guessed only after looking at the pictures?), I do remember that my mother kindly allowed me to look at the album whenever I liked because she wanted to be open with me and to honor my curiosity.

Which turned out to be abundant. For a few months, I became mildly obsessed with this man, this figure who, had my mother’s life not taken a different path, could have been my father. It both bothered me and fascinated me that a person’s life could be profoundly affected by such a fleeting trifle: a photo album tucked in a dark closet, a ghost-like figure haunting its pages from a time years before I was born.

[…continue reading “Part I: Berriault’s ‘The Stone Boy'” and find “Part II: Trevor’s ‘Le Visiteur'” at Fiction Writers Review.]