LCV Spring 2013 - (Page 77)
VELLEITY
BLACKBERRY SEASON
That longed-for ghost, my unborn daughter looked
like the quivery place a fish lips onto a pond’s lid.
We toss blackberries at each other’s mouths
as if they were tiny grenades, which in a way
If I held her, I’d see that other land where the dead
and unborn live in lake-colored clothes. Hair messy
they are—leaving their stains like bruises.
We ignore the handful of blue eggs held aloft
with marigolds. I won’t say what I promised her
to make her follow me to Illinois, my grandparents’
in my hand, fingers a nest of tangled thread.
Thin pain in my wrist. The tilt of your chin
empty house. Where grief roosted, we unclipped its wings.
Opened every window. Snapped all the rugs.
makes me think you mean red velvet cake
when your beer and berry breath leans
While once she had passed time under a sky stitched
in swallowtails, now she liked geese wintering
in for a kiss. Not once have you asked
to touch the eggs, though they are smooth
on the hoary river. She smelled like old novels, saltwater and lemon, her hand in mine, pressure on a bruise.
as the word yes, heavy as no. Blackberry seeds
turn our tongues to sandpaper and my skirt
thrown across the floor looks like a lake
where a child has drowned. I keep
~
For awhile, I called her viridian, may apple, life raft,
and her babbling matured into a willow’s green straps.
For awhile she never aged, never asked for her absent
imaginary father so for awhile our lives were happy scenes
pasted to a garden mirror. But, like all children, she found
contrary interests and spent afternoons bouncing
a tennis ball against the barn door. Locked for hours
in her bedroom, she emerged, maps of the world drawn
on her arms, her hair no longer a toddler’s goose feathers.
Before long her feet and then her heart would turn her
like the moon, one face always away from me. I told her go
back to that unlife, the seasonless world where you belong.
I warned her it only gets sadder—spoiled girl,
she slapped me. She lifted her shirt and showed me
a torso tattooed with Latin, every species of dying
frog, every white-nosed bat. Smog frothy on her chest.
Whether we fought or stewed in silence, does it matter?
It was her skin now—she’d learn she could hate it, love it, too.
that child to myself because a veil’s fallen
over your eyes. You set to work, making our bodies
into jam, but I can’t look at you, strange man,
without thinking of the woman I left,
those small sweet pumpkins that were her breasts.
Migratory as the blackberry, I landed in Portland,
forgetful of home though the motion of my legs
wrapped around your waist is like the motion of roots—
I blame the incessant rain for these eggs in my hand.
I spin them like Chinese medicine balls.
That’s the faint chime you hear in the morning
after the fuss and heat, after we slept
like patients recovering from surgery. Awake,
you say my name like you’re practicing scales.
I won’t ask you back. You were a costume
to wear, so I could, for a night, forget the eggs
nested in my hand, deposited by some malicious
Midwestern bird. A trick. Blue as robin song.
These poems were among the contest submissions of Amie Whittemore, the winner of the third annual poetry competition
sponsored by Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. She earned her MFA from Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale, and her poems have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Sycamore Review, Rattle and Cimarron Review. She
was a finalist in the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship contest and a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. Currently, she
serves as coordinator at the Academic Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha.
For more information on the poetry contest and the festival, log on to www.tennesseewilliams.net/contests/poetry-contest.
http://www.tennesseewilliams.net/contests/poetry-contest
http://www.tennesseewilliams.net/contests/poetry-contest
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