January 2017
I grew up in Pennsylvania, just south of the Appalachian mountains. Our family often visited our Irish coal mining relatives in Schuylkill County. I earned an M.S. in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin, and have remained in the Midwest ever since. I currently teach high school African and Asian Cultural Studies, and am an advisor to breakdancers and poets. I’m also involved with the Sheboygan chapter of 100,000 Poets for Change. A Pushcart Prize nominee, my poems have appeared Midwest Prairie Review, The Journal of Creative Geography, Gyroscope Review,and elsewhere. I just published a chapbook, Staring Through My Eyes, with Finishing Line Press.
Prompt: Your Mother’s Clothes
Lucy always cooked breakfast
for Ricky
proper aproned wife
but soon enough strings of trouble would start
weave the mad scheme
antics and gymnastics of possibility
patterned to the gutflow of emotion
like wide open regret
bawling frustration
howled out the TV
or slack-jawed wide open stupefied surprise
oh how we wet ourselves
Lucy did not go to college at night
protest society’s inequalities
with Fred and Ethel talking behind their hands
turning the other way
No, our Houdini taught us
to slacken the straightjacket with guffaws
noose of the fifties loosened
in 1968
my mother, who went to school at night
joined in social protest
as her marriage withered away
wore the same pair of pinstriped
polyester shorts all summer long
and didn’t seem notice
seamed together with safety pins
one day we got out of the car
to look for my brother
in a different neighborhood
when we got back in
her eyes drifted down
look at me, she said
I wonder what they thought
then tilted back her head
laughed wide open
tears pressed out
we laughed ourselves home
back to the cover of our own kitchen light
Delicate Lesson
The small blonde desk
in her bedroom, my mother
marriage-battered
with her pile of textbooks
to try to make something
of herself
mouth her private Calliope
between parallel blue lines
one time she set aside her books
to make paper dolls
with her pencil she drew
with meticulous precision
every detail of face
curve of arm
angle of foot
perfect tiny tabs for the clothes
her careful hand gave life
to paper
cut-out dolls became characters
ready to enter a story
of my own making
when I picked them up
they were so very thin
the shock delicate
in my hands
First published in Peninsula Pulse
©2016 Sylvia Cavanaugh
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