TWO POEMS
by Lisa Masé
LETTER TO MY MOM
My eyes welled when you wouldn’t leave your bed for three days at a time
with no explanation except a migraine.
Your suffering was palpable throughout the apartment, bouncing off of cold marble floors.
I wanted to avenge you, but there were too many culprits:
your father sitting on the porch with a shotgun when you missed curfew;
your mother running away with the car salesman and buying ten pairs of red pumps;
your church demanding a dollar every Sunday when your allowance was only 50 cents.
After four miscarriages you were born, blue and silent until the nurse gave you oxygen
behind privacy drapes at the Kansas City Children’s Hospital in 1941.
Raising your babies in a foreign country was the way you kept from getting burned
until you had to cross the Atlantic and walk over the coals of your memories.
You don’t believe that you’re crazy, but craziness has been rising slowly inside you
since before you were born, a candle left to singe the floral wallpaper you hated
after all the voices in your head have stumbled to bed.
You aren’t able to dampen the flames that generations of women have fanned
into the blaze I see behind those narrowing eyes. You rub throbbing temples
and let the fire of your Welsh-turned-Midwest lineage burn you alive.
I am making a reduction of my life so I might understand yours.
HOW I AM AMERICAN
I sit with a tape recorder
and my ninth grade spiral notebook
listening to Grammy Ruth weave memories
so thick my pencil will not move
across the page anymore from the weight
of great-grandmother Elizabeth’s horseback journey
across Three Forks of the Wolf River
in Kentucky to chase her husband,
brick mason for wild west towns.
They sold the table and chairs
that came on the ship with her
from Wales and bought a covered wagon
with four draft horses that would deliver them
all the way to Kansas City.
She could not have known that soon after
their baby was born, her husband would die
of typhoid while mortaring outposts
for Westport, gateway to the Santa Fe Trail.
The recorder stops like a gunshot
but her story takes flight
from the Great Plains of sorrow
where a woman raised her daughter alone
and lands on a stone at the Wolf River’s shore,
minstrels to me the tale that time forgot.
Lisa Masé (she/her and they/them) writes about family, food, geography and the invisible thread that weaves them. She teaches poetry workshops for Vermont’s Poem City events, co-facilitates a writing group, and translates poetry. Her poems have been published by Open Journal of Arts and Letters, Jacard Press, the Long Island Review, K’in Literary, Inlandia Review, Press 53, and Silver Needle Press among others.
