1 hour ago
Of Recognizable Women
My mother scrubs her life down to the knuckle
in a cone of light. It is far enough away
to call this light the past: my mother, turning
from the past to look over her shoulder
calls me by the name
only she can get away with using.
Like the nuns of childhood
with their secrets and forbidden sex, restraint
is always at her side, a goat pulled by a string.
It’s Saturday, the world
is an embarrassment of dishes
but she doesn’t light a cigarette
or anything like that. A bistro in Atlanta
on the night before my first performance,
Madeleine Klink’s mother shoves a glass
under her nose. She knows my mother
doesn’t drink. Just smell it,
she says. In 1998 I watch my gorgeous sisters
drag themselves through various degrees
of what we didn’t call disordered eating,
boys with feather pillow lips
all parted in their wake. I remember
being on that boat, waving from the hull
as a man whose jackets rhymed
took pictures of the girls. Everywhere you looked, a dolphin
carving arcs as dolphins do,
waves and waves of gulls, the kind of morning
people kill for. In the air, a crying sound
that never seemed to end.
My mother scrubs her life down to the knuckle
in a cone of light. It is far enough away
to call this light the past: my mother, turning
from the past to look over her shoulder
calls me by the name
only she can get away with using.
Like the nuns of childhood
with their secrets and forbidden sex, restraint
is always at her side, a goat pulled by a string.
It’s Saturday, the world
is an embarrassment of dishes
but she doesn’t light a cigarette
or anything like that. A bistro in Atlanta
on the night before my first performance,
Madeleine Klink’s mother shoves a glass
under her nose. She knows my mother
doesn’t drink. Just smell it,
she says. In 1998 I watch my gorgeous sisters
drag themselves through various degrees
of what we didn’t call disordered eating,
boys with feather pillow lips
all parted in their wake. I remember
being on that boat, waving from the hull
as a man whose jackets rhymed
took pictures of the girls. Everywhere you looked, a dolphin
carving arcs as dolphins do,
waves and waves of gulls, the kind of morning
people kill for. In the air, a crying sound
that never seemed to end.