Cotton Picker by Glenis Redmond (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Cotton Picker
by Glenis Redmond

A history book’s white-washed page
will not hold this telling.
I will have to bring the story
into view with my own being.
Seed brown of a girl striving in the backcountry
of Laurens County South Carolina,
my Mama, not yet my Mama,
only 90 lbs. in heft. Yet, her arms
already full of longing and escape.

When she speaks of fieldwork, even at age 85,
I can hear how a fishbone catches in her throat.
I can feel the pinch of cotton’s harsh perimeter.
How it resonates as a prison.
She recalls the cruel, inhumane hours
that they worked as Can’t see to can’t see.
I love the folk tongue metaphors.

When she opens her mouth,
she tells me of how every goodbye ain’t gone.
I shut my eyes and take in this backward walk.
I carry her rage that she will not place directly on her tongue.
I stand adjacent to the fire and witness.
I will not forget how she eked out her existence, a sentence
between cotton rows: Head down, fingers boll-torn
with tiny pearls of blood-staining white blooms.

When she speaks of cotton, I can hear the horror,
but also the pride, a curious boast.
Strangely, when a peacock puffs up in her breast,
it does so in mine, too. It stirs when she recalls
picking 250 lbs. of cotton a day
and her mother and grandmother picking 350 lbs.
I worry about the strong black woman trope
being passed down.

I think of Great-grandma Rachel
bearing 20 children. Died at age 57.
Strength can be a myth––
a way to see without seeing
our needs and our dreams.
Mama speaks of how the cold wind blew
through the slats of their sharecropper’s shack.
How the heat rode their backs in summer.
How they stuffed newspaper in their shoes
to fill the holes in their soles.
I relish when she finds dignity amongst
the barest of places.
I know this is how she gets by,
I borrow her philosophy.
We had plenty to eat. Grew and raised everything.
Went to town only for salt, pepper, and sugar.
What resilience. What lack.
I see her as a thin child.
Field-bound looking up––
a chestnut brown colored hand shading her brow
to spy a silver flash of a plane in the sky.
There, in her prayer, she manifests herself away.
Her mother sends her one county over
to her Uncle Willie and Aunt Carrie
to attend school; no place for her
to learn beyond the 8th grade in the county.
This an answer to her field prayer,
but she felt like rotten fruit spat out of her Mama’s mouth.
As a youngin, she did not understand sacrifice,
––her fate to be the first in the family
to get a high school diploma.

At Fountain Inn Colored High School
She casts her lot on Sonny Boy, daddy––
not yet my Father. Whose Air Force wings took
her out of the fields, twenty-one years away
She becomes a silver airplane circling.
She left South Carolina, but the field,
the crops, the seasons, and the sun remained within her.
Sometimes, she will not tell me stories.
She will not go back.
The sun bears down upon her
too bright. Too harsh.
She’ll turn her head away.
Say, “Let the past be, Chile.”
But I can’t.
The surface barely scratched
keeps me digging––
keeps me penning poems on pages.

PAINTING: Cotton Seed by Robert Zakanitch (1975).

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother, Jeanette, in her graduation picture from Fountain Inn Colored High School (1954).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Glenis Redmond is the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She is a 2023 Poet Laureate Fellow selected by the American Academy of Poets. Her latest books are The Listening Skin (Four Way Books), Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, with art by Jonathan Green (University of Georgia Press). Glenis received the Governor’s Award and was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2022. The Listening Skin was shortlisted for the Open Pen America and Julie Suk awards. Visit her at glenisredmond.com and on Instagram.

Author photo by Eli Warren.

Why I Can’t Find a Picture of Me with My Mother by Donna Prinzmetal (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Why I Can’t Find a Picture of Me with My Mother
by Donna Prinzmetal

Maybe it was before phone cameras documented
each cloud shaped like a wing. Maybe in the hospital
that last time, no makeup or perm, pasty skin,
no salon to make us presentable. Maybe the early ones
taken by the photographer—the black and whites,
my pixie cut, her practiced smile—
is in someone else’s attic. What I wish for is a tape
of her laugh, how it embarrassed us
in movie theaters, seemed to bubble up,
some unseen place and then explode, strangers
looking at us, how I could feel it
in my feet. Or maybe her hand, warm that last time.
Oh, that trip we took, just the two of us.
I can see her on a lawn in Switzerland, a sunny day,
vermouth cassis, its deep red, in her hand, a yellow scarf,
open mouth, mid-sentence, hair
wind-whipped, smile blossoming. So clear
in my mind. Isn’t there a photograph? There must be,
but who would have taken it? Fifteen-year-old me,
what camera? What about in the kitchen,
red leather benches, bacon, always
bacon, an afternoon with witnessing
phalaenopsis, and a white dog barking
from the yard outside. Or the sun-washed dining room,
summer light, the rubber tree outside.
Maybe she’s holding that silver bell
summoning, summoning, what?
Maybe she wanted pictures of purple orchids
grafted on palm trees, but not her,
not since she was young and radiant, hibiscus
in her still-dark hair. Pictures of her, but not
with me in them. Maybe no pictures of me
newborn, in a hospital because I might die.
Maybe she was at home that week, not taking pictures
of my ankle with the IV tube in it. My proof
is the scar there. Maybe she was afraid
to love me then. When a poetry journal
wants poems about mothers, with a picture of us
together, maybe I see her closed bedroom door,
hear her gulped sobbing behind it.
Can I submit that? Eight-year-old me,
a white door? A blooming orchid?

PHOTO: Purple orchid by Klenova.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem in my poetry group the day I submitted it for the ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series.  I am so grateful to have been in a wonderful prompt group for over 20 years. I heard about this submission call from my friend who had a poem about her mother accepted by Silver Birch Press. My friend told me that I would need a picture of my mother and myself, together, and I wasn’t sure I could find one. That made me wonder why a picture of the two of us might be hard for me to find. I did find one after I wrote the poem, but when I read the submission guidelines, I chose, instead, to send my favorite picture of my mother which is one when she was a child.

PHOTO: The author’s mother, Nancy Kaufman Prinzmetal, as a child.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Donna Prinzmetal is a poet and psychotherapist. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, and The Journal. Her first book, Snow White, When No One Was Looking, was published with CW Books in May 2014. Her new collection, Each Unkept Secret,” a finalist for the Concrete Wolf Albiso Award,  will be published in June 2024 by MoonPath Books.

Mother’s Day by Carol Alena Aronoff (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Mother’s Day
by Carol Alena Aronoff

On special occasions, I have a Hallmark
Mother—same loving sentiments preferred
year to year—hand-sewn edges
on a lace handkerchief.

Dipping toes into the well
of my mother’s patience, dragonflies
skim the surface while I hop about,
seeking out the right pebbles.

She embroidered my dresses.
All day, the ironing board stood
at attention, awaiting the drape
of starched pinafores, those same
handkerchiefs covering small
embarrassments, a maiden’s blushes.

She loved me the way a general loves
his troops—bound by honor, duty,
a more formal kind of loving—
cool as sliced autumn on beds
of fallen leaves.

I never really knew until she talked
about the smocking on those dresses.
All those tiny stitches, the threads
of torn socks curling ‘round cold fingers
as she darned, weaving all mothers
into tender circles.

This year, I will hand-letter a homemade
card; my pen will lean into the paper
like needle to thread and I will fill
each page with the love of embroidery.

PAINTING: Dragonfly by Volodymyr Konko. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem reflects my complex yet loving relationship with my mother.

PHOTO: The author’s mother. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D. is a psychologist, teacher, and poet. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has published several chapbooks (A Time to Listen, Going Nowhere in the Time of Corona, Tapestry of Secrets) and six full-length books of poetry: The Nature of Music, Cornsilk, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, Blessings From an Unseen World, and Dreaming Earth’s Body (with artist Betsie Miller-Kusz), and The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation.

May Crowning, Holy Name School 1934 by Eilzabeth Balise (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

May Crowning, Holy Name School 1934
by Eilzabeth Balise

“Pink carnation if mother’s alive; white if she isn’t.”

Fidgeting with the hanky in her sleeve
WPA* standout
fending off tears
armed wide-eyed with headache
finding her voice orphan-thin—tethered—a by wire-will
She sings it still…

“Tis the month of our Mother…”

Behind white carnation
Behind walls of flesh and ribs

HUGE WATERS
WANT—
…the church vacant of mothers
NEED—
the church

Vacant

as clear blood
BURSTS
into faint blue concert
Whirling Burning Blurring—
The PURE

—Distance—

of audience
of Saints

of God

OF HER MOTHER

“…O blessed and beautiful day….”

*WPA was the Works Progress Administration, which during the 1930s made jobs for the needy during The Great Depression. Best known for huge development projects, WPA workers also filled jobs in sewing mills, making clothing lines for the poor.  

PHOTO: White carnation by Lightfield Studios.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “On this Day, O Beautiful Mother” is sung by Catholic school children during May to honor Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Why my mother was required to perform in this ceremony only weeks after the death of her own mother has always escaped me. She was 13 and certainly grieving. Her father had died less than a year before. As an older woman, she cried telling me about it in such detail.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother, Dorothy Goldrick (top right) with her younger sister Lillian and little niece. The woman seated was her mother’s sister, Aunt Nell, who came most days to keep the young family together and out of an orphanage during the depths of the Depression.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elizabeth Balise is a long-time resident of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. Most of her working life has been devoted to human services and to teaching secondary English in public schools. Writing poetry entered her experience as a teenager, but real love for it was fostered by her relationship with her Marywood College mentor, Barbara Hofman. Poems, short stories, and articles have appeared in ergo, an early arts magazine of the old Prufrock’s Cafe in Scranton where she often stopped after work in the dark days of winter to warm up over coffee, allowing her mind to escape through her pen onto pages in her journal. Poems were born. Prufrock’s also held monthly readings; she was a regular. More recently, online forums such as Mothers Aways Write, Thirteen Mina Birds, and Ariel Chart have included her work on their sites. She was a featured poet for the United States and Canada in The Blue Nib, September 2019.  A life’s effort to complete several chapbooks of poetry expanded this winter when The Wind Does What the Wind Does was added to her titles Cat in a Time of Virus and Hey Kid. In 2021, Kelsey Books published her first volume of poems, In the Mercy of Snow.

Beneath the Crusts by Barbara Bald (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Beneath the Crusts
by Barbara Bald

I would watch her sometimes
select perfect, unbruised apples—Cortlands.

Not Macs—mushy when cooked.
Not Fuji—no tartness to balance sweetness.

Watch her hand-peel, then slice
each red orb to the same thickness.

Thick slices take too long to cook,
thin ones overcook.

Setting them aside in a covered bowl,
she’d put a cotton sleeve on her rolling pin,
flour both it and the plastic pad with its red marks
showing the exact diameter required for a 9 inch pie.

It makes the rolling easier, guarantees dough
will drape over the sides for fluting.

She’d grease and flour the bottom of the plate,
so there’d be no sticking, cut chilled-dough
precisely in half for two pies, painstakingly
roll it out inch by inch.

When done, she’d slide her palms up
under the doughy scrim, lower it into the tin
as gently as if handling a baby bird.
Should it split in the lifting, she’d re-form the ball,
chill it again and re-roll.

With bricklayer precision, she’d lay down apples
one row at a time, sprinkle cinnamon and flour
between each layer, pile white moons above the rim.
Spicy aromas already making my mouth water.

I still savor the sweetness of those pies,
regret missing the love hidden under her crusts.
Only now am I starting to realize how,
like a pinch of nutmeg sprinkled between layers,
love’s subtle flavor is often so easy to miss.

Photo by Elena Veselova. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mother grew up under the thumb of a stern Old Country father and the lessons of harsh city living. The only way she could survive and protect the love inside herself was to develop a hard outer crust. Since I developed a different way of seeing the world and a strong independent spirit, our interactions were often very rocky. It has taken me a lifetime to see the love hiding under her shielding and has left me with much to regret. This poem helped me see her through fresh eyes and clarify the mixed feelings inside myself.

PHOTO: The author’s mother as a young woman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Barbara Bald is a retired educator from New Hampshire who served as a PSNH Board Member. Her poetry books include Drive-Through Window, Other Voices/Other Lives, and Running on Empty. She assisted with Maine’s Sense of Place program, worked at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and served as an outreach coordinator for NHPTV. Barb is most interested in helping folks who think they can’t write, write. Find her at barbarabald.com.

First Poetry Reading by Fran Markover (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

First Poetry Reading
by Fran Markover

Mom wears her sparkly red dancing shoes, not the gray Velcro
therapeutics she keeps bedside. At 80 years old, she presents

her poems in the Rec Room at Long View Assisted Living.
She’s brought soft cookies for the residents with dentures.

Neighbors from Wing B circle the table so she’s not nervous.
Delores, next to her, offers a kiss on the cheek. Mom begins.

She dedicates a poem to Harold, whose recent 91st birthday
she celebrates with an added last line: “Harold, coffee cake

for you to forget what aches.“ The audience applauds, pats
Harold on the back. She continues with Butterflies in the Garden.

“Orange and black butterflies are beautiful, my life is so full.”
One of the residents interrupts, declares, “Oh, yes,

they’re awfully pretty.“ Mom nods, the audience ahhing
as if they can picture the Painted Ladies and Mourning Cloaks

who hover outside over the seniors’ flower garden.
And for half an hour, friends attend to rhyme and Hallmark

sentiments. No one wants my mother’s reading to end—
stanzas embroidered by gossip, complaints of sore knees,

coughs, crunches of oatmeal cookies. And when the nurse
signals time for the activities room to clear for evening’s

Coloring Group, mom thanks her listeners, pink rose in hand
from an admirer plucking it from the nursing home vase.

Photo by Evgeniya Timlyashina. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My poetry is a daily practice and has been for a few decades. “First Poetry Reading” was written a few years before my mother passed away in 2019. She was so proud to be called a poet. And I wanted to capture the joys of mom’s triumphant reading.

PHOTO: The author’s mother, Clare Markover (2015).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Fran Markover lives in Ithaca, New York. She is a retired psychotherapist and addictions counselor whose poems have appeared in many journals. Her chapbook, History’s Trail, was published by Finishing Line Press, and her book, Grandfather’s Mandolin (Passager Press), was a finalist for the Henry Morgenthau III First Book Poetry Prize. Recognitions include nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as poetry awards—Anna Davidson Rosenberg, Miriam Chaikin, Poets’ Billow and ruth weiss Foundation honors, and Constance Saltonstall Foundation residencies.

Zoology: A Case Study by Joe Cottonwood (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Zoology: A Case Study
by Joe Cottonwood

See the soft soul
of one chiseled girl
in a vast city, Baltimore,
surreptitiously tipping books
to learn of ovary, sperm, egg,
singing in the Episcopal choir.

Her beauty is her enemy.
She escapes the choirmaster
to a public school staying late to peer
through the one and only microscope,
pursued by boys, men,
watching cells replicate, grow
feeling twin passion
a brain for science, a womb for womanhood.

A chance for university, scholarship
encouraged by a father of no education.
In the Great Depression she boards the train
for biology as a discovery, not a trap.

Sixteen years at a microscope
over Drosophila chromosomes,
a woman in a man’s lab.
All the good men go to war.
A professor steals credit.

Half starved, doctorate achieved,
Japan radioactive,
love unleashed,
last egg saved.
I’m born.

Previously published in Amsterdam Quarterly.

PHOTO: Extreme magnification, wing of fruit fly (Drosophila ) by Razvan Cornel Constantin.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mother died 55 years ago, long before #metoo, so my memories of her are colored by what I’ve learned about sexism in the sciences since she passed.  She spoke of it rarely and without rancor although she did mention that one world-famous name was “a wolf.” She always looked forward, not back. The first in her family ever to go to college, she enrolled in Goucher College, September 1929. The stock market crashed in October 1929.

PHOTO: The author’s mother in the Embryology Laboratory at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri (1934).

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother graduated from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1942, and did post-graduate research there. After a long and winding trail, she ended up working at the founding of the National Medical Library adjacent to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. One day (this would be in the 1960s), she came home beaming and told us she’d just indexed a study that cited her thesis. She was so modest; she seemed surprised anybody had noticed it. Recently, I visited the Washington University library and held in my hands—and read—her actual study of nerve cells in drosophila. Yes, Mom, we notice. Good work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book is Random Saints. You can find him (and his poems) on Facebook. Visit him at joecottonwood.com.

Dusting the Mountains by Polly Brown (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Dusting the Mountains
by Polly Brown

      Up on a stool where she probably
shouldn’t have stood, my mother tacked
      two plastic maps to the wall: pale green
rectangles of molded relief. Carefully
      she matched terrain along the seam,
creating this span from Portsmouth,
      near the lower edge, to Kingfield
toward the top—mountains a bumpy
      rubble strewn north to south.

      Her great-grandchildren stand here
sometimes, to read like Braille this model
      of her world, their fingers following
the Sandy River as it threads between hills,
      or discovering how only a corner
of ocean in the south feels flat. (I myself
      have climbed Mt. Washington,
several different routes, and flown
      with hawks, peak to peak.)

      Today, before a family visit, I apply
the tender cloud of her lambswool duster
      to the mountains. I hold in mind
a recent image of Mt. Blue—that lavender
      sweep of shoulder, trees bare—
and thank once more the ghost who gave us
      this wrinkled place to love,
who chose, all her life, when she could,
      a long, wide view.

IMAGE: Maine raised relief map by Hubbard Scientific, available at Mapshop.com. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: After many years elsewhere, my husband and I now live in a place that was my mother’s and before that my grandmother’s, across the river from my father’s family’s dairy farm. Layers and layers of memory, along with new understanding of the weather, landscape, risks and changes in this place. My mother—a map-collector, kite-maker, genealogist, naturalist, poet, librarian, and legendarily kind person—still shows up everywhere, often in action, and that’s mostly wonderful and always clarifying.

PHOTO: The author and her mother at the Green Hill Senior Living, West Orange, New Jersey. Photo by Alex Brown (May 2017). 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Polly Brown took her first two years of retirement to write a blog about what she’d learned from teaching young adolescents, at ayeartothinkitover.com. Now she’s resettled an old family farm in western Maine, where she’s raising poems and a few green beans. Pebble Leaf Feather Knife, from Cherry Grove Collections in 2019, followed two chapbooks, Blue Heron Stone, from Every Other Thursday Poetry, and Each Thing Torn from Any of Us, from Finishing Line. Recent poems have appeared in Appalachia, Hole in the Head Review, Poetry East, and Quartet Journal, among others. Visit her at pollybrownpoet.blogspot.com.

&n

Wordless by Stephen Anderson (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Wordless
by Stephen Anderson

I remember the
Red brick house of
My childhood in Atlanta, &
The pale, almost ghostlike image
Of my mother, perpetually in bed,
With frail arms with just enough strength
To gently hug me, caress my hair
When I, her freckled-face cherub,
Ambled into her domain there &
    broke
Her silent self-vigil.
I remember taking leave of my marble games,
Creek-swimming, tower-climbing, & my forest treks —
My entire 7-year-old existence — when I sensed that she
Might be calling me, like a sweet siren, so that she could again
Stroke my hair as I nestled next to her on her bed,
As I, with a sense of something I didn’t understand,
    submitted instinctively to
Her timely, ever so timely beckoning there.

Previously featured in the author’s collection The Dream Angel Plays the Cello (Kelsay Books, 2019).

PAINTING: Mother and Child by Orest Kiprensky (1809).

PHOTO: The author with his mother in Fairmont, Minnesota, around 1945.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My father, mother, and me taken in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was raised. I am probably five years old. The photo was taken prior to my mother’s illness, which would lead to her death when I was eight years old.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, poet and writer whose work has appeared in Southwest Review, Latin American Literature Today, Amsterdam Quarterly, Verse Wisconsin, Foundling Review, Twist In Time, Tipton Poetry Journal, New Purlieu Review, Free Verse, Poetica Review, Life And Legends, Blue Heron Speaks, as well as in numerous other print and online journals. He was the recipient of the First Place Award in the Wisconsin Fellowship Of Poets 2005 Triad Contest, and he received an Honorable Mention in the WFOP’s 2016 Chapbook Contest. Many of his poems have been featured on the Milwaukee NPR affiliate WUWM Lake Effect Program. Anderson is the author of three chapbooks, as well as three full-length collections, In the Garden of Angels and Demons (2017), The Dream Angel Plays The Cello (2019), and High Wire (late 2021). In the summer of 2013, six of his poems formed the text for a chamber music song cycle entitled The Privileged Secrets of the Arch performed by some musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and an opera singer.  A fourth poetry collection, On the Third Planet from the Sun: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming in the summer of 2024 (Kelsay Books). Anderson’s work is being archived in the Stephen Anderson Collection in the Special Collections Section of the Raynor Libraries at Marquette University.

Queen of the Dwarves by Margaret Benbow (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Queen of the Dwarves
by Margaret Benbow

She was borne away by an engine ornate, fiery and black
to oversee an uncle’s burial.

Uncle Bill had been the ravenous
King Kong in our family fairy tale, bolting rows of sweet corn
and gobbling ingots of butter at Reunions,
beer bubbling in his ears, plums up his nose,
his roaring beefy tongue popping with hotdogs
and Scotch curses, a new wife
sitting on his hand every few years.
Now his pigskin heart had exploded

and our mother’s calmness was frantically summoned
by the hysterical fourth wife.
She rode to the rescue on a dragon-black train,
bolt upright and pushing it all the way. Once there
she ordered the special, jumbo casket,
she blessed the giant’s exploded corpuscles
with a gentle veil of white flowers,
dignified his furry pagan paunch in a kingly suit of black.
She directed when cables would lower his bulk,
heavy as a crusader in full mail, to the inner earth
where seethed gobs of minerals, and his ancestors’ lacy bones.
Old wives’ and young wives’ cupid’s-bow kisses
colored his big ornery face ravishing shades of rose.
Afterward, the peach-fed oils of Mother’s baked ham
soothed mourners’ torn nerve endings,
the precise rectangles of her bar cookies
made them feel they could go on.

At home we shivered in coldest eclipse,
for she was the queen
of our tribe of dwarves.
I fought my baby instinct to stroke her red jacket
in the closet where it glowed.
Finally one midnight the dragon brought her back.
I’d heard corpses were green, and rotten-bellied with fear
still had to ask. Yes, she said; Uncle Bill had been a little green,
but was now shining in heaven, silvery with grandma and Abraham.
She believed it, too.
When she looked up, all of her beloved dead
waved from the constellations.

My hard little coconut head
processed her words. I looked suspiciously
at those stars, privately had my doubts.
But I looked into her gentle face and decided,
then and lifelong,
never to tell.

PHOTO: Crown by Tomert.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The “Queen” narrative is an adaptation of an event in our family life. “Uncle Bill” was actually not a relative, but a family friend whom my parents had known since college days. He was tumultuous and hard-drinking, larger than life in every way, but also a loyal and affectionate friend. He married several times. When he died,  his young fourth wife was in panic and chaos because she didn’t know how to proceed or “make arrangements.” She begged my mother for help. My mother was both kind and competent. She took the train to the city where they lived, managed and arranged everything in her orderly way, with grace, and then traveled home.  We were little children at the time—her “Dwarves”—and danced madly when she returned. She and I also had the brief conversation about death and heaven, word for word.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: The 1946 photo of my mother (Kathryn Savides) and me was taken by my uncle, Philip Savides. He had been a bomber pilot during the war, and when he returned home, became an expert photographer, always of peaceful images. The photo was taken during a family reunion in Sauk County, Wisconsin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margaret Benbow’s poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, Triquarterly, and The Ekphrastic Review. Her first poetry collection, Stalking Joy, won the Walt McDonald First Book award and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Benbow has now completed a second poetry collection, The Hunting Mother. Her book of stories, Boy Into Panther, won the Many Voices Project award and was published in 2018 by New Rivers Press.

Author photo at farmer’s market by Karen Updike (2021).