3 / Poems from the
Propel Poetry Series
When Allen Ginsberg wrote “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed,” he was referring to the cruel electro-shock treatments and lobotomies forced on queer and neurodiverse people in America’s psychiatric institutions. Ginsberg was a survivor of the barbarous hospitals of the 1950s. Walt Whitman wrote vivid prose following a series of strokes. Readers know these stories but tend to see disability as exotic. All too often crippled poets are not thought of as being an important part of diversity and inclusion in contemporary literature even though disability is everywhere once we learn to see it.
In 2023 Nine Mile began to exclusively publish poetry collections by poets whose disabilities have been invited into their imaginations. Inaugurating the Propel Poetry Series I wrote: What can we learn from poetry about crippled bodies and the culture of crippled bodies? Is what we see in a poem merely a figurative illustration of extrinsic historical or political truths or do poets create fresh bindings of identity and consciousness? If you ask poets, the latter is the case. If you ask poets with disabilities, you’ll learn about “disability gain”—where disability is not defined by loss and is instead a source of insight. Human experience is variable like shades of grass. While the non-disabled know this, able-bodied poetry continues to see disablement as a calamity. In the poems of Charles Simic, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, blindness always represents hopelessness. Simic is not alone.
The term “disability gain” comes from the deaf community. It means, among other things, “there is a freshness deep down things.”
We will now publish three new books in this series: Somewhere on the Ledge of Fallen Things by Lisa Dougherty; The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded by Nathan Spoon; and How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? by Anne Kaier.​
​
An early taste of their work in this issue follows.
​
Stephen Kuusisto
Lisa Dougherty
Poems from Somewhere on the Ledge of Fallen Things
Small as Hope in the Helicopter Rain
Among the tall grass and clover flowers our youngest sits picking. She squints an eye shut and holds one up to the light twisting at its stem. Slow and careful. She wants to know how the sunlight breaks through its petals and so begins pulling them out one by one. Her sing-song voice counting them until they are all gone. What she takes from this she will tell no one. Then a helicopter seed. And a new question as she continues to pick it up and toss it into the air. Despite its falling back to the ground, every time. But soon they are falling all around her. A strong wind has brought them almost fluttering in a way she seems somehow familiar with. And suddenly she is spinning with them. She, this girl we worried so much about her walking late. Always tripping over nothing, and even now still unable to come down off her toes. And yet she is spinning and stretching her arms out as if to welcome something back. Something we at some point lost. Something, small as hope in the helicopter rain.
Autism on the Earth’s Delicate Carpet
She tilts her head to one shoulder
And covers her other ear
To write, the sound of a pencil
Is like scratching paper.
And the meltdown
Should she have to erase
More homework than usual tonight.
So I let her take a break out back,
With the condition of bare feet.
And she just lays in the shaded grass
With her shirt lifted over her belly
To feel the coolness
Of the earth’s delicate carpet.
At least today she is not in a pace’
Walking the house with her animal
And bumping it into her head.
There is air spray in every room
In case a bad smell.
Because she knows me making
Her favorite muffins
When I’m still mixing in the bowl.
So please don’t let them sit her
Next to the kid who farts a lot in class.
She will be honest and extreme!
And yet she tells me things
Like did I know, butterflies
Have taste-buds on their feet?
Or will ask me in a bath how
The tub is liquid with water
That is really two gasses? And why
Doesn’t blowing air bubbles change it?
She dries off and gets ready for bed,
Cuddles up shirtless by the air vent
Then puts her feet under the bed
To fall asleep on the floor.
It’s her world of small spaces
Her feelings of safeness.
And I get to keep these small moments of her,
When beyond all her questionings
She turns on her music
And we say our I Love You’s,
It’s always, Can you lay with me?
And then I just listen to her,
Sometimes still chatting away,
Or, just breathing.
​
Killdeer
Why the sight of thought
Makes you stand perfectly
Still in the presence of her
Absence. You attach yourself to
Who takes you away from
The being that you are. Bird
Is it that you have forgotten
The cracked shell your heart is
Nests in the brittle shrubbery
Of the past growing more
Present, that you cannot even
Drag your unbroken wing
As if it had been
Brave to desire this
One transitory body.
​
Less Like Strides Toward Anything
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
—Rumi
On a day I couldn’t possibly remember,
with the first steps I ever took, I have to imagine
there was a window I was looking out,
but probably stumbled first over some toy,
banged my knee and got distracted.
And you, already seventeen years on your own
time, didn’t even notice, but ran too fast
into the tree limb you forgot to duck.
And somewhere along the way as I walked
into my first school, where I didn’t smile
and refused a retake for the yearbook,
maybe you were getting ready for your first shift
in a factory where the dogs guard,
and snarling at the gate, chase away
even the slightest scent of happy
you might have hidden not deep enough
in your pocket. You hang on to a quarter
circa the year I was born, and don’t know
why you decide to break the bill from your wallet
to cover the twelve odd cents
hung over on your tab at the diner.
How the years were fast by. Seemingly less
like strides towards anything,
and certainly nothing of certainty.
As when I bought my first prom dress
a size too big for me, and you
nervously slid on your first lover’s finger,
a ring that didn’t fit. And so what?
Is it not a big deal, how small things never are?
—how I, even with the first shufflings
of my small feet, and you were already so far ahead,
towards the window of all things “We,”
began walking.
​
The Deep Falling Inside Her
Inside her there is a streetlamp
that some nights she can meet you under
not so far from the pain
as she would have you think,
she pulls you into her
do not flicker through the deep falling
inside her is a light
you haven’t before reached.
​
You Want an Encore
Where the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
—Rumi
our mouths still in silence applaud
for what we both lean quiet into
and so our eyes become a tangled way
my tongue could only twist around with
the taste of you still in my mouth
and the words of after sex fast pulsing
in those unable to speak moments
I’m thinking and I just shake my head
right then when you ask me what?
​
A Gesture Too Tired Not to Speak
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
—Rumi
And what would you have placed there? If I
opened my hands
to you with the loose cup of my palms held
together.
Would you be able to recognize the sacrament I was asking? Would you accept my body for what its parchment was telling you? Just read through its wounded landscape and don’t ask for words. Then maybe you could understand more, how some are born
a cold light’s fragment. How the scarred
glow
through the hovered smoke of dead incense,
there is still a way
for what is without body to be held. I’ll
ask again,
do you have much faith in me? Because I have wandered far too long and repented nothing. Opened small spaces for light to fill. But never was able to keep warm long. Do you see now,
the shards
of my fingertips beginning to break? There is little time, I need to open a new place for you
to let me take you in. I have come far
and together we could both stay warm.
​
Where Something Was Once Made
In a small town where everything
but the people come and go
how they leaned into one another
was all that mattered
in the abandoned archway
at the factory of shadows.
​
People You May Know
I want to thank Facebook for informing me
I may in fact know my own brother. And I want to
thank Facebook furthermore for giving me the chance to
“Friend” him. Cuz see, I often forget
how the brother I grew up with,
who would often push me to the ground
or throw me into the ditch on the corner
where we were dropped off
exposing my magenta panties to the children left
on the school bus, their encouragements shouting
through the open windows he looked back to,
how he too was just trying to be liked.
I want to thank Facebook for giving me a hand
to extend you. The truth, I could not have soon enough
come to think of: the word brother
—as would be defined by our sibling relationship
and the word friend—as it could be, defined by you,
are synonyms not like the ones they teach
to my six-year-old daughter in school. How I pray
she will learn this on her own, more quickly than I did.
I want to thank Facebook for a simple button,
and the two small words +add friend in a rectangular box,
the ease of sending you a request, by no means small.
And I want to thank Facebook for the button
they will send for you to accept, in its own rectangle
should you tap twice, I could begin again
to “Like” something, anything at all, about you.
​
How Nothing Ever Rises into Place
There is no uncertainty left for the apples that fall to the ground. Or for the teenage girl whose father shared publicly the video he took of her hair piled on the floor after cutting it off as punishment for a misdeed. What it was she understood as she looked down a few days later when he was done was all she took with her when she jumped from the overpass? There is something to be learned from a baby bird that hesitates before flying. How falling is the only direction we know for sure.
Maybe if I Start Small
If it meant pushing you to safety, I’d like to think
I would have put myself in the path of an oncoming car.
But honestly, I can’t be sure. If I would have
been there to punch out the teeth
of the classmate who picked on you
in the lunch line, I would have done so
for no other reason than No One Fucks with Family.
”It’s just principle” I’d say, though not so plain and simple.
And I admit, it wouldn’t have been for the right reasons.
But it still seems strange to think how I was protective
of you, my older brother. Because you are
that feeling like a fist clinched inside my chest
so tightly the nails have permanently pressed
their crescent shapes, side by side onto the heel of my palm.
Perhaps that is why even the want to forgive you
doesn’t really surprise me so much
as it angers me that I haven’t figured out how.
But maybe if I start small, take your hands for example,
begin by forgiving that one part of you. Then
maybe we could celebrate. For the hand
I would open to you is all ready, decorated
with a banner.
​
Somewhere on the Ledge of Fallen Things
Maybe it’s a dust covered windowsill. A mantle often overlooked. Or a shelf in the bedroom of your grown child where her most favorite toys have sat long since having been played with. Did you not expect to end up here? At some point, waiting to be picked back up? I suppose you need me to tell you— you can’t be all broken. Not all at once anyway. Look here, a glass bottle with a chipped lip. You don’t really know why you kept it, but for how the sun still finds a way to pass its light on through. Is that nothing like you? Even the old dried out remains of what used to be a blow flower, left for years between a closed window and an open screen. It still remembers the soft breath of your child lifting its seed. And how she laughed when they all blew back and stuck their fluff in her hair. Are you laughing now? Maybe there’s still something here that can help you. Somewhere on the ledge of fallen things, an old wooden earring box your mother had your brother give to you on your seventh birthday. Its hinges nearly pried off from overuse. Or not? But anyway, have you opened its lid lately? If you found its lost song, could you sing it for me?— or just once, try?
Nathan Spoon
From The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded
Beauty and Shadow
A monster came out of that mountain you said. That’s
impossible. Stop pulling my leg I said. I was holding
your hand and I’m sorry but what’s true is true
you said. If a monster came out of that mountain
as you say then said mountain is the mother of said
monster I said. Yes with a womb for gestating said
monster you said. That is nothing short of brilliant
and amazing as all fantastical things that are true
are. This time it was the earth beneath our feet and
heartbeats speaking. She was filled with her usual
somber music: the kind stars love falling asleep to.
Please do not take too long the long sky of space
begged as I want my hair to be washed and looking
its best. I want to be a beautiful and exemplary beast.
Birth Magic
The mythos behind you is like the mythos before
you. You know the way it can spiral curatively
into itself until the present unloads a few of its
mysteries. You wear your raincoat in every type
of weather as if the vine is all that matters. Only
life clearly is more than vine more even than
power flowing flowerlike from wooden walls.
There is more still as figures interchangeably are
interchangeably mother and father to you. The
mythos of today is like the mythos of yesterday.
This is what makes everything beautiful. This is
what makes art itself. Numinously earth trembles
as it turns. There are terrible energies inside you
that harmonize with energies inside starry depths.
Have a Great Day
The man in the brown sweater
had taken off his shoes
and was eating a donut for lunch
along with a handful
of gummy worms. That looks
mostly unhealthy a bystander said.
It is the man said
but I learned to eat like this
during the war. Which one
the bystander asked.
I can’t remember anymore
the man said as he took his last bite
and licked his fingertips
and then the palms of his hands.
What I don’t like
is how sticky this meal is
the man said. A cloud had grown large
immediately overhead
and was casting a shadow
in every direction.
Do you mind if I ask you
why you have taken off your shoes
the bystander said. I can’t remember
that now either the man said.
The bystander shook his head
and glanced at his phone. Have
a great day the bystander said
before continuing down the sidewalk.
You too said the man
as he headed in another direction.
Hymn for Lighting the Sky
A bird in the air is a bird in my hair
which makes sense if you think about it
you said. I was holding a shell and looking
into the next horizon while turning
the page on our old glow. I will text you
when I get there I said. That’s perfect
you said. Driving to another town is less of
a chore when you love your destination
like I do. Upon arrival I stopped at a
favorite coffee shop and ordered a cup of tea.
What will you do next the barista asked.
Next I will disappear I said. Before you do
do you mind letting me take your photo for
the wall they said. What wall I asked. The
wall of remembrance they said. Sure and I
certainly hope to be remembered I said.
The Idle Remark
Peering into the cardboard box I see a mass
of iris bulbs. It gets me wondering : not only
I think is my embodiment so many boxes
of iris bulbs but so are the interior parts of
myself since everybody or box has both
an inside and an outside. Anyway there is
nothing special about wondering which is
what is so wonderful about it. When the sun
rises to start its day there is nothing difficult
in what is happening. All difficulty is perceived
and understandable. A friend once told me :
you can touch the moon in a way not many
others can and yet you don’t know how
to talk to people about it. Fair enough I said
before moving further into the room of a now
altered future. I like it better I said later to
myself the way I feel resting among layers of
leaves at the edges of yards or deep in forests.
A stranger announced a love-hate relationship
with iris bulbs taking root now in moonlight.
Lick the Toad
What is the difference between place and shape.
What connects disparate futures lifting rhythms
from the ocean and rolling them into the long
infinities of your heart. Poison goes down better
when nobody else is around: nobody except the
one who wants to release themself. Your voice
is who you are when the world is doing things it
loves doing. Anyone pursuing you beyond this
point will fall into a trance and be transmuted by
one or another of their other selves. Rhythms
are better than trances if you love the real cloak
covering the horses’ heads of tomorrow. You
feel ill with wonder at the sound of your breath.
You lick again for the mystery of remembrance.
Phoenixlike
People living inside and outside of fences
are eating or choking down entire meals,
reading whole feeds or tomes the size
of the complete works of plato,
while i am complaining about them all
for being so gratuitous. Honestly, what kind
of person completes anything. I just want
to bite an apple while sipping from a cup of coffee
that has turned room temperature. I will
never think of anything grand or accomplish
a thing of note. I am less a platonist and more
an informalist who is almost as able as
a variation on a meme to be consistently
so. One minute i am on my feed too
only to wonder what is going to happen
when the road between this unincorporated
community and the neighboring proper
town of springfield, tn has been repaved. They
are working on it. I know because we just got hung
in the sap of friday afternoon traffic. This is
a field after all where somebody is waiting to
feel what happens. Not knowing if i can,
i take off my shoes to make an image (being
the inconsistently inconsistent person i
sometimes am) i imagine will never be unmade,
here where a fence runs between the earth
of our neighbor’s yard and ours. Like goodness.
Like the marrow in the ash of bones. Like
tenderness as unexpected as it is deserved. We
will be gone before we can dare arrive.
Remoteness
People looking for the sun rarely find it. Instead
they see stars and catch glimpses of those celestial
bodies that merely reflect light. No derogation is
meant. The distinction between bodies capable
of generating light and those that only reflect is
entirely factual. How else could spotting the sun
be difficult. Light for all its power is exceedingly
tender and who can fault it for acting according
to its nature for being there despite invisibility.
Life is nothing if not filled to overflowing with
craft as if the future is constantly losing its own
edge like dawn. The sun can obscure whatever
it brings to living light by being obscured. Know
yourself and you will find the sun everywhere.
The Scholars
That’s so cringey the scholar said. Absolutely
another said. Before anyone can even say what
if anything is happening it is probably worth
constructing a foundational point of departure
if that is you care about the theory of absence.
The scholars looked behind each other and
were unable to determine who or perhaps what
had made that last remark. They felt so old
older than mountains which of course are not
particularly old in the scheme of things. Who
cares whether or not it is raining in distant
places. We have all the water we need at hand.
Anybody is brimming with fortune before they
are capable of creation. If the reason life is
good is simultaneously the same and different
why not return to the long city. It was time for
breakfast and more scholars had joined the
initial pair. We know how to live dangerously
the pair announced to the others. That’s so
great and we believe you the newcomers said.
The Three Trees at Hudimesnil
I shouldn’t be doing this the room said. I didn’t
know rooms could do anything much less
talk about it I said. Well that’s on you the room
said but at least you know better now. A person
wearing a pink shirt gray jacket and beige pants
was stroking their chin. Another one was wearing
a mask. A big part of living is matching what
you do or say to what else is being done or said
by others. The difficulty is in knowing where to
draw the line. For example the philosophical and
conceptual mind desires to be included with its
casual counterparts such as the need for rest and
idleness. We are living through imperfect times
and clearly deserve all the shit we’ll give ourselves.
Today
We are here to collect the most
beautiful starlight around.
From the sides of mountains, we
exit the doors set to keep us
hale and hearty. The fire of our
hair is gray, and we are smoldering like
on the hearth. Remembering
is in hand each time we open
one of ours. Night draws itself
firmly around us. It is filling
with songs of snow. The world
as we know and feel it is
ancient and goofy. Where we
readily are becomes a furthering of far.
Waiting by the Door
Under a blanket as transparent as itself
and as piled up as junk in a yard
you found your future. The numbers on the clock moved
in their usual procession. A quake rose
through the earth like a wave
with patches on its elbows before disappearing into
the weave of an unspectacular
upholstery fabric. The signal had grown long
as memory even as it fades
like notes of music perfect for
the moment. Later in the night
trees swayed and knew they belonged
knew they were integral to the alchemy a reader
desires at least some of the time. And here it is.
In the future when the box is opened
mummies will invade the neighborhood. Comets will fall
on top of that from the aching vastness of space.
They will be filled with glades and fjords
and trails and shrubberies as familiar to us
as we are to the grimacing windows of ourselves.
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities. The author of The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded (forthcoming from Nine Mile Books), his poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Mid/South Sonnets: A Belle Point Press Anthology, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. He is editor of Queerly.
Anne Kaier
From How Can I Say it was Not Enough
Skin
Tight as tree bark,
skin stretches across my cheek,
pulling provident flesh
down from my eyes,
leaving them bare as winter birch.
In the summer city heat,
my red face gleams.
On my thighs, skin shards rise in ridges,
row after row, sharp as cactus thorn.
Charlie, then five,
fondled my arm, “Don’t worry, Auntie,
you’ll grow fur.”
Only I haven’t.
No balm but a stinging salve,
made by a doc in his lab,
or a drug so strong
it eats my bones.
I sit beside my garden yew,
stroke its flanks.
My legs peel in grainy strips,
exposing raw pulp,
leaving thumbs of thick
adhering bark behind.
I bristle;
bound by scale
I cannot burst.
The Dressing Table
In the danger zone of mother’s dressing room,
at five on a February day,
I watched her work at her mahogany table,
a slender woman in a slip.
After years as a practicing beauty,
she sketched high brows and blushed her coral cheeks.
I sat in a blue chintz chair,
hardly a gazelle at fifteen.
Her perfume looked like scotch.
With hands that stroke so hard it hurts,
she rubbed on gloss; then smacked
her lips and snapped the compact shut,
as if she’d trumped at cards.
I fed on the scent of her,
willing her to bring me into the game of
women hunting men,
but she kept her secrets to herself.
She stepped into her satin gown.
“Zip me up, will you, honey? I’m late.”
My rough, red fingers fumbled
pinning a spray of diamonds at her breast.
She flicked her eyes at her full-length mirror,
“How do I look?”
What could I say? “Gorgeous.”
She curved her hand half-moon
around my face and rustled out.
Mother’s Perfume
I brought another jar from France
in its brown Art Deco box.
She asked if I had ever smelled it.
Of course I had. On her dressing table,
in her hair, on a sweater in her chest of drawers.
“Daddy loved that scent,” she said, remembering—what?
A touch, a kiss from her lover,
nearly fifty years ago?
​
In Church
Hunched against the altar rail,
my naked haunches spread,
I watched the church bloom around me,
a place of pleasure where
light falls on cloth of gold,
on incense motes and ancient chants.
There I sat, riding my thighs,
gardenias in a bowl by my hand,
eager to preach a passion sermon
and rub the fragrant petals to myself,
when mother started from a wooden pew,
a killing prohibition in her eyes.
Mother Love
1. Visiting you
Thin with muscle like twisted rope,
you hugged me tight—a welcoming ritual
you always make at your back door. You smiled,
looked proprietary, as if you knew
you own me deep.
2. At your dinner table
“I could have let you die when you were born,” you said,
clawing your goblet of wine.
I settled my buttocks in the back of my chair,
safer in the fullness of my flesh, opening a little
at that candlelit table, where I have lingered, waiting
for you to strike.
We sat in that high, wide room,
windows open to crickets’ hum.
Your hands stroked a silver knife, hands
so strong they hurt a baby when you rock it.
Looking at the flame, you said, “I could have let you die of your disease;
no one would have blamed me.”
But my body, my body.
You kept it from me. You kept it sterile,
high in a serpentine crack
in the ceiling.
It’s not my flesh but a thing I wear around
like an unshed snake skin.
3. The waiting room
When Dr. Shelley snapped the curtain shut,
you flirted with him. I always knew
you had a thing for Shelley.
I offered my small arm, a ruler’s length of scale,
for his soft, scientific gaze
as you asked, “Anything new, a cure?”
On the ride home, closed in the car,
my body hovered like a fly on the window-pane.
I shriveled further in the skin we
never said a word about.
You begged me, “Talk to me, Anne, talk to me!”
I could not please you,
I could not make my arm,
my twelve peeling inches,
clean, soft, pretty.
4. Thanksgiving
You sat at the head of your table
like a great spider;
there for fifty years,
you’ve spun a net of linens, flowers, Merlot fumes.
You told Indiana stories,
looking through the great bay windows to the hawthorn tree,
drinking champagne in a Waterford glass.
“When I was young,” you said, “the Ku Klux Klan
burnt crosses on our Courthouse lawn.
We saw white hoods in my boyfriend’s house, but
we didn’t think a thing about it.”
“Weren’t you afraid?” I asked. “The Klan hated Catholics
in Indiana in the twenties.”
“Oh no, no,” you said, “no…”
I gave it up, turned to my brother, Ed.
“Why wouldn’t she have been afraid?” I asked.
“She was a pretty girl,” he said.
“She knew they wouldn’t hurt a pretty girl.”
Coda
Your kisses have always been wet, Mother;
your mouth open, your mouth on mine, wet with love.
Should I take your body now,
taut with muscle, slender still,
scars where breasts should be;
should I fold you in my arms,
smooth my hands along your pelvic bone,
lick your pubic hair, still black and thick
in my imagination?
You are young there,
there in your inner lips.
My mouth sucks your mound.
I suckle your sexual self,
your lips, your juice.
I wind your black hairs
around my tongue.
If I make love to you at last,
will you let me go?
When All is Said and Done: Mother at Eighty-Five
1.
Her mouth gleams mauve against her face; her smile spreads ferocious.
She sits upright in her languorous backyard chair.
That morning in the summer heat, she’d played the full eighteen, every single hole. “Oh yes, I always play eighteen. It’s no good playing nine.”
Cradling her scotch, her kitten nosing at her feet, she gives instructions for her china:
“After I die, I want it all to come to you. Your brother can take care of his wife.”
2.
We eat our dinner on a terrace at the club, overlooking sand traps – oval scarabs on the Pennsylvania land. I scan the shapes of trees—how they sway in a breeze.
A child in a white dress stares at me, stunned at my red, round face
among the crew-cut Catholics in their peach and green. I stare back,
hard like a cat.
Driving myself home by the river, I hear ancient sycamores swing, crickets sing in the underbrush.
I bend above the steering wheel, shot through with her bullets. “Talk to me,” she said. “Your brother doesn’t call. Talk to me!”
In my own house, a piece of charcoal lies near a clean white jug.
I lift the stick, slash the sketch book page.
Tonight she told me, tearing up, about her last, real embrace with her man.
“We knew his mind had dimmed. He knew that I’d take care of him.”
Their love thrusts through my belly.
3.
Every time I see her now, she talks about the day that I was born.
When she woke from ether, Daddy smiled wide. “We have twins, Pat.”
Later, seeing how the baby’s brittle skin broke and bled,
he urged his wife, “Talk to her, Pat, talk to her.”
For weeks, I languished in the ward, where nurses, tending war wounded men,
neglected me. Then my mom came back,
tucked me in a wicker laundry basket, carried me
down the great white steps of Allegheny General,
and nestled me where she could feed me when I cried.
“I tried hard,” she says. “I didn’t give up.” So, giving up had crossed her mind.
Just let the baby die she might have thought. This strange, disordered daughter.
When all is said and done, do facts speak alone? Or do I need to say,
“My mother took my life into her hands and brought me home?”
After the Golden Afternoon
After the golden afternoon,
when the dark came down like a blade,
a sudden illumination spoke.
Last night, my widowed mother tossed her auburn hair
as if she were a girl of twenty.
“Oh, I turned heads,” she said. “The boys flocked around.”
She looked at me and smiled. “But I waited
for your daddy.”
Staring at her candlelight, at last I understood
how her creed had bound me:
beauty before marriage, but marriage isn’t everything.
What labor, this autumn, readied me
for this simple truth,
let it sit upon my mind
like evening sun on ploughed fields?
Mothers and Daughters
1.
Last night, I came to her again,
up the tree-lined allée of her love.
She sat in judgment:
“Why are you leaving your corporate job? Don’t they like you now?”
I didn’t dodge while she
fixed her gaze on me. “What’s your plan?” she asked, snorting.
“Write, read, teach,” I answered, looking her full in the eye.
“Come live with me,” she said, sensing her chance
to comfort and contort me, tangle
my branches with hers.
“No,” I said, “it would never work; you know that.”
She shrugged. “The offer’s always open.”
Perhaps I’m learning how to tell the truth
and still survive it.
2.
Then we spread old photos on the table: an Indiana wedding, 1917.
Her mother and her aunts strolling in her grandfather’s garden.
Tonight she laughed and named their names: Grace, Louella, Josephine.
The bride, Aunt Jo, wore plumes, waltzed in her husband’s arms.
3.
I took a photo home—without permission.
My mother, still a silken child,
curves her arm around her widowed mama’s waist.
Nana stands upright. A string of wooden beads falls past her breasts.
She holds her daughter to her; and in her look, she will kill
anyone who comes too close.
Not me, I swore. This will never be a snap of mom and me.
I’m not that kind of daughter.
Still, she and I have sidled near each other lately.
I wouldn’t call it courting—
maybe just less wary love.
Old Roses
December 31, 1999
dusk
Today, you called to say how much you love me, Mother.
Suddenly, I saw old roses in your face, roses
like the thick fragrant reds that throng
your silver chastened bowl in summer;
roses like the climbing whites
that grow around your bedroom window;
roses like the yellow cups that circle
some pensive Degas woman.
Oh, let your roses shine tonight
in the last blue light.
My Mother’s Voice
My mother’s voice won’t leave me
when she dies. It twists
cords in my throat,
throttles my song, rings
me out. Inoperable, mine
since I could hear it,
her voice lives in my tones,
twines through my voice,
as mine through hers,
like two vines, their roots in tangled love
commingled.
If I unbind one
from the other, both
will die out.
Madame X
Painter John Singer Sargent’s most famous portrait, called Madame X,
is of Virginie Gautreau, a celebrated American beauty living in Paris in the 1880s,
known for her sexual allure.
I want to be you, Madame X,
I want to walk in your silky pale skin,
stir your black satin dress,
feel men’s admiring eyes and the glances women give to glamor
as I glide in furs down the Rue di Rivoli.
I want to swing in your cool thighs,
feel my blood pink your breasts,
pulse in your lovely, lucid arms,
I want to clench your inner lips curled in their brown nest,
cohabit you, leave my rough, red skin behind.
Rescue me, Madame X,
take me out of this body not my own,
reach your suave hands toward me,
bring me to you, hip to hip,
reach in and rescue me.
I was born to be a beauty, to all the love that comes with loveliness.
Lift me to you, Madame X, wrap your arms around me,
curve your legs with mine.
Reach down and rescue me from stale abandonment,
reach down as if you were the Virgin Mother,
reach down and raise me up.
Anne Kaier’s memoir, They Said I Couldn’t Have a Love Life, was a Finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize. Her essays have appeared widely in venues such as The Kenyon Review, 1966journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the anthology About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times for which she appeared on NPR’s Radio Times. “Maple Lane” was mentioned on the list of notables in an edition of Best American Essays. Poems have appeared in several anthologies including the 2012 ALA Notable Book Beauty is a Verb: An Anthology of Poetry, Poetics, and Disability.
