To her, I’m the mild-mannered woman

who cooks her meals.

She is going to leave me a tip

when she finds her purse.

She sits for hours, eyebrow

cocked in a wrinkled study

as if she could fathom

the distance between us,

saves pieces of thread

in a coffee can,

picked from her afghan all day

while both our lives unravel.

Thanksgiving, she put a hammer

in the oven at 400 degrees,

spent the rest of the day

on the back porch step,

wanting only to leave

this strange house,

silently wringing her hands

as if her body could not contain her.

Word Tech Editions: Bird Missing from One Shoulder

The machines weep their noise

as Father offers his card to the clock

on his last night at the cotton mill.

Time stares with one eye,

transfixed on him.

Cold shocks his lungs

as the metal door behind him shrugs

itself closed.  The black windows

of the factory watch him walk home

as they have every dawn for 30 years.

They do not see him as I do

as he enters our door,

white lint clinging to his hair

like a disintegrating halo, dying

for an undemanding bed,

the joy of his aching body

twisted in the cogs of sleep.

I can hear the rasp of his throat,

disgruntled snore,

the gasp,

Choices

I search through my closet,

try to decide what to wear,

go through the house

luring mirrors to myself.

Clothes make me think of mama,

hanging wash outside on the line.

Choice to her was a hard wire

stretched across the yard.

When she looked down it,

all she could see was its vanishing point.

She never noticed

how her dresses

danced with the sun,

each to their own rhythm,

how the bells of her skirts

captured the wind,

how her blouses struck poses,

side by side, acting out different lives.

The First Night

As we lie

side by side,

strangers,

my fingers search

your back,

feel the jagged edge

of the rib you gave

in your sleep

to make me.

For this night

I want

to put it back,

until I am bone

of your bone

and flesh

of your flesh

and you feel whole again.

In the morning

I will open the wound

so gently

you may not hear me

rise

and tiptoe

out of the garden.

Go down to the river,

put in a thin hand,

drink the reflection of stars.

As you gather the gold,

notice how it empties itself

of light, hold in your palm

all you never tasted.

Let your lips remember

the past, swallow

the dark and the cold.

Tell the river

how you loved me.

When you take back your hand

watch the ripple leave its center

Beyond the Window

The tree outside mama’s window

is filled with waiting apples

never quite right for pie.

Her children climb its boughs

in search of one less sour

while the ground rots the rest.

Petals lie at the rose’s foot.

She thinks of her husband’s love

true as a thorn,

honest as harsh noon light.

The unwatched potatoes on the stove

are overcooked, the water wasting away.

She stirs without looking,

tastes for salt,

gazes through the glass pane

cracked in a quarrel years ago

but never fixed.

It doesn’t bother her now.

I have to reach deeper each year

for all that is stored

in the pockets of this house.

This is a day we have to slow ourselves

to feel what time has deepened.

My own body, half-remembering,

lingers in a doorway.

Children pick plums

off the near-bare tree

outside the kitchen.

The day dissolves into hungry reaching.

Mother watches at the window

drinking in the one life she must live,

rolls lint in her apron pocket,

suffers love in the smallest of things.

She is tired now,

a fragile cup to be hummed into.

I can hear a familiar lullaby

in her good-byes.

We leave all at once

like awkward adolescents

avoiding an intimacy,

mother’s hands folded on her lap

to fill its emptiness.

We are already

thinking of tomorrow

as if the past

is just a house we visit.

Linda Annas Ferguson.

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