Joan Mazza Verse-Virtual 2016 December

December 2016

I have begun to explore some genealogy and have had my DNA tested. Now that I have dozens of questions to ask my ancestors, only one of them survives. I guess I’ll be writing more creative non-fiction. By reading and writing poetry, I come to terms with my obsessions. www.JoanMazza.com

Never Exaggerate

Ten thousand onions I have sliced,
peeled twice again that many carrots.
I’ve washed two million dishes, a hundred
thousand pots. A trillion socks sorted
and bundled into sausages lined up

in wooded drawers. In sleep, tangled
in the sheets, I’m still folding towels,
tee-shirts, ironing piles of handkerchiefs.
Dozens of children I’ve carried on my hip
while folding diapers, warming bottles.

I’ve fed cats and dogs and washed
their water bowls, swept up tankers
of lost fur and puppy poop. Even
the woodstove, lurking in the basement,
gulps log after log or dies out.

I’ve walked to the moon and back
behind a vacuum cleaner, to the sun
on all those trips to school, my personal
Appalachian Trail. Consider the tonnage
of the forks and spoons I’ve lifted
to my mouth, lakes of liquid swilled.

How many leaves have I raked to drag
and dump in woods, where they turn back
into earth? All life’s a pantoum, our chores
like lines repeating, seasons like stanzas,
no white space to tell us where it ends.

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