Friday, January 27, 2023

Friday, January 27, 2023: Miriam Sagan's "What I Forgot to Say" and "What I Forgot to Say to Mother"

 What I Forgot to Say



  I like your hair. I’m sorry I mentioned your hair. Hair is a dangerous topic between mother and daughter. If I notice you have hair, before I know it might I not be demonically possessed by an evil Jewish mother, saying: “pull your hair out of your face. You are so pretty, why don’t you…” and “you call that a haircut?”

  I forgot to say: keep away from junkies. Sorry. I actually know I’ve said this over and over. I myself failed. Once when you were a baby I found myself—and you too—in an SUV in a skanky part of Burque as a drug deal went down. The driver, buying the drugs, was a friend of your father’s, and a punk rocker. They were in a band.

  “Why didn’t you take the baby and just walk away?” my therapist confronted me. In that neighborhood? Before cell phones? I sat tight, but even now I feel bad about it.

  The Death Doula asked me, over a chai latte at Java Joe’s on Siler, if I was writing people letters. It’s odd—I’ve embroidered Grainne two pillowcases and I’ve written Rich a letter. But not you. Have I told you enough that I think you are brilliant and a genius artist and a great mom? Have I mentioned that your hair used to really annoy me, particularly the half-shaved head in high school? Maybe it is better for me to shut up, and just assume you know how much I love and admire you. After all, what is a daughter if not a letter, a letter to the future, a letter against the patriarchy, a letter on stationary embossed with mermaids and octopi. What is a daughter if not blue ink floating on water, ink that will make an incredible pattern, both predictable and completely new and mysterious.


***


What I Forgot to Say to My Mother


  Shut up and leave me alone. Stop telling me I am so fat I look pregnant. Stop telling me I look like a whore in my mini-skirt. Just stop.

  But I was too inhibited to say these things, too frightened, too pressured. My mother would scream and get hysterical and I’d just take it, suck it up, patch it up, smile at dinner.

  Some people leave the families they were born into and don’t look back. Yes, I could have done that. I ended up with an uneasy compromise. I left home the day after high school graduation. I told my mother only lies from my mid-twenties on. Yet there was some friendliness between us. I don’t regret that, but it also isn’t something I’m proud of. When she cleaned out the 17 room house she lived in for over fifty years she found all the cards I’d sent and all the pretty presents: the glass blown fruit, the vase embossed with lily pads and dragonflies, the amber beads. “You did care,” she said to me in a tone of nasty wonderment.

  Now that I’m old and dying I have no idea what she wanted from me. She one told me how she hated it when I learned to walk, and then toddled away from her. My natural curiosity was an insult, an abandonment. Mean as she was, I wasn’t discouraged from having my own child. I just thought it would be difficult, very difficult. I thought children would bring out the desire in me to slap, to hurt, to control. But I would fight hard against the desire to inflict harm.

Imagine my shock when my daughter was born and I felt no urge to hurt her. In fact, I just wanted to enjoy her, make her smile, and keep her cozy. This wasn’t just a good feeling—it was horrifying. I’d just assumed motherhood was overwhelming and beyond annoying. Then I found it delightful. It was therefore my mother, after all, who had indulged her own anger. Not my small helpless self that had caused it.


© 2023 Miriam Sagan






Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her most recent include Bluebeard's Castle (Red Mountain, 2019) and A Hundred Cups of Coffee (Tres Chicas, 2019). She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the creative team Maternal Mitochondria in venues ranging from RV Parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Friday, Jan 20, 2023: Jeanie Greenfelder's "Childhood Garden"

 Childhood’s Garden      

 

Back when a star was something to wish on,

all I knew was family, friends, home, 

street, and the-corner-grocer Mr. Wolf.


Dogs were dogs and kept in yards, and children—

just kids. We knew not to tell parents

what we did, and they did not want to know.

 

Happiness was finding an empty soda bottle

to return for a two-cent deposit and hearing

Mr. Wolf’s fingers tap as I pondered penny candy.

 

Walls were for playing catch, steps for jumping,

sidewalks for scooters or hopscotch, fences for 

climbing, and time was for finding four-leaf clovers.


Hardships were a rainy day, having to pull weeds,

getting called in during a game of hide and seek, 

a skinned knee, a ball sliding down the storm drain, 

 

losing my house key, swallowing a fish bone, 

no one to play with, being called names, 

or Mr. Wolf out of bubble gum.

 

I miss the garden.


© 2023 Jeanie Greenfelder



 




Bio: Jeanie Greenfelder’s poems have been published at American Life in Poetry, Writer’s Almanac, and Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day; in anthologies: Paris, Etc., Pushing the Envelope: Epistolary Poems; and in journals: Miramar, Thema, Askew, Persimmon Tree, and others. She served as the San Luis Obispo County poet laureate, 2017,18. Jeanie’s books are: Biting the Apple, Marriage and Other Leaps of Faith, and I Got What I Came For. jeaniegreensfelder.com



Friday, January 6, 2023

Friday, January 6, 2022: Two poems by Maria A. Arana

hungry fire… young woman

 

hungry fire

quiet mist

dangerous goddess

come heave elaborate words

to a young woman

stabbed beauty

playing a game of fright

sick of the storm

running across the sea

 

© 2023 Maria A. Arana

 





you watch me from your window

 

forgetting I am smoke

whose embers

still burn

all that touch

my image

can you see the change

and want the same space


© 2023 Maria A. Arana






 Maria A. Arana is a teacher, writer, poet, and editor. Her poetry has been published in various journals including Spectrum, The Gonzo Press, and The Kleksograph. You can find her at https://twitter.com/m_a_Arana and https://aranaeditingservices.com