Strange Arts & Visual Delights
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Mouth Work (St Andrews University Press, 2016) has many poems inspired by life in the family. “Pregnant 1951” imagines August of that year when my parents had been married seven months and I was two months away from being born. The poem is based partly on stories I’ve heard (the fainting in the street, the silk blouse), partly on my own observation (Daddy’s scars and his habit of sleeping with one arm held straight up), partly on imagination. Towards the end of the poem, fiction takes over. Pregnant
1951 Elopes. Pregnant the first week. Turns eighteen. Glows. At commencement, her mama’s face burns, but she is proud to show the bulge beneath her skirt-- her life-till-now’s work. The world is her bouquet-- dogwood with ten-penny wounds, lacy fringe tree, meadowsweet, morning glory in the hay. In idle August, she hauls her belly to the store for a Co-Cola. The streets under her soles are soft and hot as pudding. The heat puddling the blacktop looks so wet she could mop it up and wring it into a cup, but she sees it rise and shimmy like her one silk blouse on the line. She faints on Goolsby Street. Night. He sleeps. Aroused by heat and thunder, she fingers the gouge in his cheek from a knife fight over dice. She runs her hand over his thighs, caressing the old wound puckered by a nail in a loose board. To him, she’s already Mama. He’s Daddy to her. She sighs, My man, all mine. He turns on his side. His arm rises like a flag. The hand above her hovers for hours as he sleeps. The first weeks she hardly slept, afraid it might collapse. Always done it, he swears. But now, she fears no blow or punch from his hand that’s clenched as if it holds dice and cocked as if about to throw craps. Posted 3 August 2024. Send comments to [email protected].
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