MOTHERS

When Brigit Pegeen Kelly writes about holding her daughter,

I pretend this is my mother speaking.

We are orphans together,

running the red bridge

from Japanese garden to British garden,

hushed laughter until we reach the greenhouse on the slope,

chests heaving. Chased

by the stepmother’s cruel blue eyes.

She reaches for me

across the bed we share for the weekend

(You’re grinding your teeth):

a translation occurring, in the case of worry,

from compassion (woundable)

to antagonism (wounding).

My mother’s eyes were are also blue, but warmer,

softened by greens—

algal blooms

stitching blankets over unswum pools.

Much has been lost, but not this.

Outside of poems, our tones rarely match

the core of what we are saying.

How surely we are contained,

writes Brigit Pegeen Kelly

at the end of the beginning

of her first book.

How well our small boundaries love us.

How well my mother gave birth to a boy;

how well, and long after,

that baby latched. And I saw it like a vision: the tragedy I’d asked for:

I would be asked to raise him.

And so I practiced boarding a bus,

just the baby and me,

dipping my finger into honey

and nippling it into his mouth.

In the land of our foremothers

roamed a spirit called Mamuna,

who rose at night from swamps to raid

the closest bassinets.

I often feel the love our boundaries have for us

dooms, to some extent, the love we have for each other.

But it also feels true to say a smallness can be stretched,

and our lights shined through.

Brigit, who can’t sleep when the moon is approaching fullness,

through whom a private current glows,

who describes her son as a scything soldier,

her daughter as a hapless beauty, a ghost now, singing

through black-haired goats on the side of the road,

slow water, and every small, brown winging

in the bushes in the bramble—

Is it OK if I call you Brigit?

What does it mean to say I love you?

My mother collects the phrase I love you in various languages,

from strangers in cafés and airports.

Phone tucked to my ear,

book cradled on my lap,

I describe out loud the cedars,

and the quality of the air—cool, ice flecks—

and she says yes,

she can already smell it that way.

It was said you could persuade Mamuna

to return the baby she stole from you

if you hit the changeling with a stick

and poured water over its head from an eggshell.

It was said my mother was evil. This was a lie.

The poem must be mess because we love each other.

How well my switching lineage,

the sliver of Pacific

visible in the periphery,

my ache

when I click the correct number

and hear her voice on the other side.

Growing up, I could always tell

when my mother had recently talked to her mother

because her accent would be thicker.

Want like won’t.

I am surprised to find this effect still applies,

considering my grandmother can no longer speak.

For a long time, the only part of my poems anyone praised

were the endings.

I didn’t mind.

The way I understood it, if the ending was good,

it cast goodness back over the whole.

I thought we could be saved at the last minute.

In a language neither of us knows,

she is telling me she loves me,

and I am repeating the sounds back to her,

learning.

It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest.