new work

I’m very pleased to have my poem, bone country, published in the online edition of New Texas: Journal of Literature and Culture today. Many thanks to the editors, Dr. Francine Richter, et al.

 — for Mary Ann
  
 i sit in your rocking chair
 thinking what it must
 have been like to be you
 —great-grandmother
 braided white hair
 cane-backed poddy-chair
 —its porcelain pot
 how cold it was
 when i sat there
 my bottom  bare
 as my dangling feet
 the thinker thinking ...

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As a child, I adored this woman, my great-grandmother. The only way I ever really knew her was with dementia, or what was then called “senility.” I don’t think she knew me or recognized me, as she rarely interacted with anyone around her, living in her own world.

But something in my childhood mind respected her and held her in great awe, her ever-presence; her thin-blue skin; her white, white hair and the way she spoke aloud for everyone to hear, a preacher, preaching what was left of her mind.

Sometimes, I think of her part in birthing me: her womb carrying my mother’s mother with my grandmother’s eggs already present in her developing fetus, eggs that would become my mother. How her holding on meant survival for all of us.

At times when I am feeling a bit sorry for myself, I think of her tenacity, the hardships she endured, the obstacles she overcame and how, my genes are her genes and that, if for no other reason, is why I too have all I need to persevere.