May 2022
Bio Note: During COVID and my late husband's illness and dying, I wrote furiously. I could not stop. To my surprise and gratitude, the poems became a chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, and was just published by Glass Lyre Press. I have begun writing about horrid war, but they are not ready to be shared.
Neighborhood
I didn’t imagine Stevie who built forts with clay and plugs
would die from heroin.
Anyway, that’s not my story.
Though I called his mother every month before her death.
I didn’t imagine Arlene’s mother hit her.
Arlene’s mother let me stay for dinner.
Anyway, that’s not my story.
They didn’t live in my house, my house second from the end.
That’s not my story either.
It belongs to another girl I vaguely recall though lately
she shoves open my shutters, yells for me to come in for lunch.
I don’t know where I live anymore.
No one was who I thought they were.
In my imagination a song is playing, and I am dancing with Anna.
Anna is the story, and she doesn’t know it.
What do I know?
Anna with red wings that opened for me and hovered over the houses of bullies.
She is dead now too. I cannot ask.
Now sadness lives inside, I don’t recognize it.
I have become its house.
When We Didn't Love Our Bodies
When I was thirteen, sister told a friend on the phone, “Amy’s built like a brick shithouse.” I didn’t understand my body, how to wear it. You dressed me in clothes two sizes too big, blouson bathing suits, dresses designed for women. I was a girl.
I learned to hide. I learned to eat the hidden candy in the lower left credenza drawer when no one was looking. I learned whoever I was, I was not beautiful.
Mother, I believed I would break you or save you. You, my trace chain of fiction, my slender strand of perfect American pearls. Your breasts subtle as chestnuts, your waist eggshell; my sister got those. I was the keeper of the paternal genetic material. Even as a girl, my hips a workhorse, lugging our history.
But beauty did not save you. You slept all afternoon in your midday room; I called you the bed general. Your black hair spun in pink rollers against a silk pillow, beside you another, rough cotton. I didn’t know how exhausting it can be to carry melancholy everywhere, but I learned. You handed me your self-hate like a precious gift.
When your old brain finally filled with confusion, you refused to die, surprising since you had tried years ago, crammed with pills, your head bobbing, a thin branch bowing. That night, your last, I slept beside you, a blanket on the floor, held your hand. Mother, your hand in mine, a spiderweb inside a garden. I told you how I slept beside your granddaughter’s bed when she was afraid.
She’s beautiful, as she is. As am I. As were you.
©2022 Amy Small-McKinney
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