Solution by Lowell Murphree (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Solution
by Lowell Murphree

3:38 a.m is
An unmade bed
And Polish cup
With sagging tea bag
Even the furnace
Has turned itself off

Why does it please me
This little solution to
A sock constricted
In the night
Around my swollen calf?

Why did I not think
Before to cut it
Open just an inch?

I know

You, Mother, would
Have had a fit
Discovering in the wash
Sturdy fabric weakened for mere comfort

Well, you are dead now
And I am old
And too alone to listen
To whispered admonitions

Go back to bed
Alabama girl
We’ll talk
After sunrise
I, ghost enough myself,
Take comfort where I can.

PAINTING: The Sock Knitter by Grace Cossington Smith (1915).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem flowed out of my morning pages discipline. I find speaking with my mother, Edith Murphree, and others who have died to be quite natural, but I am sometimes surprised where they show themselves as partners with me in this life. I prefer to write spare poems and prose.

PHOTO: The author’s mother, Edith Murphree, during the 1960s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lowell Murphree lives and writes in the Kittitas Valley of Washington State. He was born in Kansas, raised in Nebraska, and lived in New York City and Rhode Island before coming to Washington State. Lowell holds BAs in Religion and in English from Nebraska Wesleyan University and a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary. Several of his poems have appeared in Silver Birch Press series. Find him on Facebook.

Plant a Lily by Mike Jewett (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Plant a Lily
by Mike Jewett

Tin pan alley.
Sundays threaten
beatboxers timpani
& siskins (Spinus
pinus). Dabs of
mustard preened
into drab feathers.

Tiny hymns conga —
groundswells for
roving feet.

You did this to me.

Delicate ragtimes
shatter under
cloudcover
& cold ER
linens.

You did this to me.

Her radiated head
shattered bald
with cloudcover.

Robins shout
cheerio cheerio
outside the ink
of window glass
like Sistine
photography

minefields
of malpractice.

Scantily clad the way
unopened newspapers
are, the way prayer
marinates tongues,
& tonight your sighs
are my gasps.

You did this to me.
An exaltation of
guilt amounting
to an oil slick.
You made me breed

thunder to ward off
your state. Cheerio
cheerio. A tin pan
bedpan clangs
loudest when

overflowing
with coins.

It was all I could do
to put you here.

It was all I could do
to save you.

Bing Crosby whistling
’round and ’round, warm
crackling fire of vinyl
lovingly tracing the curves
of the air from wooden
speakers. Too much

medicine slowly killed
you so fast. My permission
didn’t know. My permission
just didn’t know.

You did this to me you
told me as I held on to you,
a brutal echo thirty years
ago, your last words
last will and testament
last rites

indelible. On the seventh
day you rested and He was
resurrected and we buried you
and today, robins cheerio and
today, their eggs are blue and
today, I will save you and
today, I did this to you and today,

I will plant a lily.

PAINTING: White Lilies by Alex Katz (1966).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem came about as my sudden grief of my grandmother’s death 30 years ago, her last words to my mother before she died, and the brutal guilt that has plagued my mother since.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother and maternal grandmother, around 1970.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mike Jewett is published extensively. He runs a poetry workshop in Boston, Massachusetts. His first books of poetry are due for publication during 2024.

My Mother, the Milkmaid, and Myself by Judy Kronenfeld (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

My Mother, the Milkmaid, and Myself
by Judy Kronenfeld

My mother, though no connoisseur of art,
adored The Milkmaid by Vermeer.
She was an immigrant with little learning
“by the book” who’d lived in Lemberg
and Vienna—whether decently or poorly
now I’ll never know. I think she might have loved
the crusty pieces of stale bread—so real
she’d want to grab a hunk—about to be
a meal with milk. She often ate the parts
of food we’d never touch, like chicken feet,
so they’d not go to waste. She came to understand
true quality, but always hated ostentation.

Having waited ages to “fix up”
the Bronx apartment I was raised in—
for the brocade sofa and the silky coverlet—
she might have fondly noticed the kitchen wall,
that humble nail anticipating something
to hang on it, the maze of cracks.
She must have seen the broken pane
in the glowing window—sweet
as the once familiar and one’s own.
I wonder if her eyes were pleased
by Vermeer’s mastery of streaming light
illuminating half the sturdy milkmaid’s face,
most of her starched white cap,
and the richest color in the room—
the royal blue, made from lapis lazuli
exactingly refined—used
for her radiant apron.

But mainly, I hope she saw what I now see:
the artist’s reverence—for the maid of all
work’s focused countenance, for her hands’ embrace
of the unglazed jug and the simple act
of pouring, for how she watches the flow
of milk into the bowl with such majestic
calm. When my mother looked at
her reproduction of the painting
hanging over the credenza in our foyer,
I hope she knew—even without conscious
naming—that preparing wholesome
food, polishing my shoes for school,
and keeping our crowded apartment clean
had dignity. Because she already sensed,
and not without reason,
that the daughter in whom she’d
fiercely inculcated the value
of education, had had too much
to value such devotions—and spoke with her
on sufferance.

PAINTING: The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer (c. 1660).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This is the only ekphrastic poem I’ve written that is the result, not only of looking at a painting to see what it says to me, but also of looking at a painting my mother clearly loved (a reproduction of which once hung on a wall in my childhood apartment), and imagining what it said to her, trying to see it through her eyes. As with all ekphrastic poems, some part of the process is looking very closely at the art work, seeing the pieces of crusty bread, the cracks in the wall, the little nail, and the broken pane, seeing the way the light falls, even perhaps doing a little quick research (for example, on how the royal blue color was made). Once the poem is on its trajectory, those details get used in ways not entirely anticipated. A great many of my poems are based on memory, on going over aspects or events of my childhood, and there is often, to my delight, an element of discovery in the process of writing them. The past yields up new insights when re-examined. In this poem, the rather academic study of the painting at the end of the second stanza yields to a more personal vision in the third stanza that is a kind of apology for the behavior of this mother’s daughter when she was a girl; it is a vision of the dignity of the work of this maid of all work, and of the dignity of the mother’s work—a giving of reverence now to the memory of her mother’s labors, to compensate for when reverence was not given.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother and me, New York, 1943. (This may have been professionally taken, but I don’t know by whom!)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Judy Kronenfeld’s five full-length books of poetry include Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), available on Amazon and via links at judykronenfeld.com. Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and widely in journals including Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verdad. Judy has also published criticism—including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998)—short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her sixth book of poems, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, was recently released by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!, is forthcoming from Bamboo Dart in June, 2024. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2024/2025.

Missing Braids by Anne Elizabeth Laird (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Missing Braids
by Anne Elizabeth Laird

My cousin Judy is carrying a death-bed promise
as we walk into the Eugene Beauty College.
I ask: Why are we here?
Your mom wanted you to get a haircut, she says.
But I don’t want a haircut, I can just trim my braids.
Judy usually listens to me, but not this time.

Her eyes tear up and I want to go home,
the home where no one knows
how to braid a ten-year-old’s hair anymore.
All the young stylists seem to know
why I’m here. I imagine them whispering:
She’s here because her mom died . . .

It’s already paid for, another says,
leading me to a cutting chair where she unties,
then cuts, the hair my mom last braided.
When she turns my chair around I see my red face
with straight-across bangs and not one
hair touching my neck.

When it grows back I pull it into a ponytail.
At least I can see my real face again.

PAINTING: Mother plaits daughter’s hair by Christian Krohg (1888).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My poem, “Missing Braids,” is my remembrance of the day after my mother’s death, when my braids were cut off, at age 10. This was previously arranged by my mother before her death, because my father and brothers wouldn’t be able to “do” braids. Over the past years, I’ve been unearthing the feelings of loss from her absence, and their reverberations over my lifetime.

PHOTO: The author as a child with her beautiful braids.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anne Elizabeth Laird grew up in Oregon, and migrated to Washington State after graduate school.  She worked as a school psychologist until 2012.

Winter Blue by Diana Dinverno (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Winter Blue
by Diana Dinverno

She looks up at me
from the center
of what appears to be
            a faultless circle,

from memory of a photo
I’ve now misplaced—

my youngest aunt,
the one I loved most,
seated on the floor
in a dress my mother made,
an ice-blue taffeta swirl.

            Those early years
are muted
as Whistler landscapes
—unless you spend time
with them, you see nothing.

She was never there
before school when I stood
at the kitchen window—
studied the stark outlines
of trees, Shetland pony, head
down, slowly moving around
the field, an ocean of blue,
            when I ran coatless,
like any winter child,
out the door, across
gravel with an apple
my mother had placed
in the palm of my hand.

            Same blue
at twilight—when my aunt stood
at that window, arms crossed;
Mother at the chipped enamel sink;
me skating on the backyard
rink—rhythmic breath and blades
cutting a path at the perimeter—
believing that,
somehow, I could keep
            the world spinning

            until the sisters found
a way to extinguish
static charges that sparked
between them.

I blinked and they were gone.

I aim my camera
at the bruised sky,
knowing a photo
will never do it justice.

I spent years squinting
at what was always there,
and now, finally see
two mothers curling around
one daughter, me.

PAINTING: The Blue Girl by James McNeill Whistler (1874).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mother, Rae, and her youngest sister, Ruth, were over 12 years apart in age, from a family of eight children born during The Depression and raised in difficult circumstances—the loss of Rae’s father to a farming accident, a mother with neither the skill, nor the capacity to mother, further complicated by a disastrous second marriage that produced Ruth. These girls stuck together for life, through bad times and good, and became the two fierce women who shaped my life.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION:  My birth mother, born in 1938, on the left, and her sister, my adoptive mother, born in 1926. The photograph was likely taken sometime in the early 1950s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Diana Dinverno is the author of When Truth Comes Home to Roost (Celery City Chapbooks, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Westchester Review, Panoply Magazine, The MacGuffin, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Michigan Poetry Society’s 2019 Margo LaGatutta Memorial Award, the Barbara Sykes Memorial Humor Poem Prize, and the 2022 Chancellor’s Prize. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, Diana writes and practices law in Michigan. Find more at dianadinverno.com and on Facebook.

Kintsugi by Beth Copeland (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Kintsugi
by Beth Copeland

Mother’s Japanese friends
send cards she forgets

to open—prints of blond
birds flying

over turquoise waves, pine branches
burdened with snow. Her mailbox,

stuffed with letters
and junk. I slice

into an envelope and pluck a handwritten
note from Kinko-san: I have not heard

from you. I am worried. You are so
old. Mother snorts, She’s

almost as old as I am!
and we laugh

at what’s lost
in translation. She forgets bills,

to brush her teeth or swallow
her thyroid pills and Lipitor

but remembers Kinko-san
from long ago. Should I write to say you’re

okay? I’ll do it
later, but she won’t. She stares

at a maple for hours when I’m
not here, her hair a corona

of uncombed
dandelion seeds. Should I

laugh or cry? Like a broken
bowl mended with molten

gold, she’s more
beautiful than before. I hold

her in the heart
of my heart

where she’s whole.

Originally published in the author’s collection, Blue Honey, recipient of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, The Broadkill River Press, 2017. 

PHOTO: Teacup with gold streaks exhibiting Kintsugi repair (Vlad islavovich, photographer). Kintsugi celebrates breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote “Kintsugi” when my mother was in an assisted living home because she had short-term memory loss. She would forget to check her mail, and one day we found a card from Kinko-san, a woman she knew when she and my father were serving as missionaries in Japan during the 1950s. She and Kinko-san had corresponded with each other for 50 years.

PHOTO: The author with her mother Louise, her older sister Joy, and Kinko-san and her family on the occasion of Kinko-san’s son’s first birthday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Beth Copeland is the author of Selfie with Cherry (Glass Lyre Press, 2022); Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. Shibori Blue: Thirty-six Views of The Peak, a collection of her original photographs and poems, is forthcoming from Redhawk Press.

The Nespelem Girl by Inés Hernández-Ávila (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

The Nespelem Girl
by Inés Hernández-Ávila

When my mom traveled to Galveston, Texas in 1946, the Tribal Tribune
(of the Colville Reservation) had a tiny story titled
“Nespelem Girl Marries.”
My mom kept the little article and gave it to me. It is my treasure.

íinim Niimiipu píke, my Nez Perce mom, was her own person. Always.

Daring risktaker for her time. WWII. She thought, “Hmm, I wonder what work I could find in Seattle?” Making her way there by herself, picking up odd jobs until she found the one meant for her.

Janice the riveter—Boeing Aircraft Factory. Imagine. The Nespelem Girl meeting other strong, risk-taking women from all over the country. Forging independence, Niimiipuu style, earning a salary, sending most of it home, but keeping a little for herself (she loved Joy perfume back then). Realizing what the world “out there” looked like.

During free time, off work, dressing up, styling, hair just right, bold lipstick, taking lots of photos solo or with friends in those cramped little photo booths. Back home in Nespelem I found a cigar box full of those photos of hers. In each one, I am drawn to her eyes. In each photo she looks directly at the camera, as she did in life. She looked straight at you, and that meeting of the eyes had to be real. She could tell if it wasn’t.

Soldiers Clubs on weekends. Patriotic to support the troops. Socializing with them, dancing, laughing, going out with your best girl buds, and your sisters when they came to town to stay with you in your sparse but nicely kept attic apartment.

Meeting my handsome Tejano dad, a Marine. Semper fidelis. Traveling by train to Galveston, Texas, to marry him. The Nespelem Girl finding herself in the heart of Texas-Mexican culture. My dad’s dad her ally, seeing his own mother in my mom’s Nativeness.

Becoming Catholic to marry my dad, but after I turned seven and made my First Communion, she took me aside and said, “ok, now you can go with your father to Mass every Sunday, or you can stay at home with me.”

Choice. My mom gave me choice. She didn’t argue with my dad about religion. She respected his faith. And she respected my right to decide.

Catholic notions of confession, sin, guilt, and dominion over the earth did not sit well with her. She never accepted Christianity, even though all her siblings did. She would say, adamantly, “I believe in God, that’s all.”

Despite only going as far as seventh grade, she loved to read and write. It was part of her curiousness. She wanted to know things, to be informed. She made me a passionate reader and writer. She loved language.

But oh!

Not one to budge if she had her own opinion, or if she was upset. I’ve been known to say, “If my mom is upset with you, you could drop dead in front of her, and it would make no difference. She would merely turn her head away to ignore you still.” You cease to exist until you make things right, if you have done something to offend, or until you understand that you will never be able to force her into anything, including changing her mind.

“Don’t say, ‘I love you,’ if you don’t mean it,” she would say. Mean your words, don’t treat language carelessly, don’t let your voice be false. Words have spirit, power, heart. Sometimes she would say firmly in family, “I have spoken.”

In the Niimiipuu language the word tamálwit means our laws, our governance, the way we are supposed to be true humans. This is when she would remind us.

When something terrible would happen, some offense to someone, some betrayal, some wrongdoing, so big as to leave her speechless, she would say, “Words fail me!”

The tenderness: One of my dear friends told me after he first met her, “Your mom has such a girlish laughter!” She did. Even in her nineties, she was known for her laughter, her delight, her inclination, like so many Native folks, to want to laugh, to need to laugh, to be light-hearted. Those who loved her wanted to make her laugh. We were healed by her laughter.

My mom felt for every living thing. She would be filled with sadness to see suffering. Fierce love. Fierce woman. Fierce mom. The Nespelem Girl always stood up for herself. My father was so fortunate to meet his match in her. I am so grateful they are my parents.

Qe’ciyéwyew, íinim píke.

PHOTO: Vintage bottle of Joy de Jean Patou perfume.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mom was a force to be reckoned with. She and my dad knew full well what they had in each other. I am an only child, so I had ample time to observe, to notice, to listen, to grow in awareness about each of them. My mom, and therefore I, are from Chief Joseph’s band of the Nez Perce. We are enrolled on the Colville Reservation in Washington State. My dad was Texas-Mexican. He taught my mom to love Tejano conjunto music (though she never learned Spanish). They would go dancing every weekend with his brothers, cousins, and their wives. He trusted her so much that he turned over his check to her whenever he got paid, keeping 10% for his expenses. So much to their story that I’m writing a collection to honor them. In my life, an odd thing has occurred. Some people have wanted me to choose one side or the other, to identify as either Nez Perce or Tejana—as if I could erase either one of my parents. But theirs is a riveting story that I am telling. She once gave me her handwritten copy of a Kahlil Gibran poem that says, “But let there be spaces in your togetherness / Love one another, but make not a bond of love— / Sing and dance together and be joyous / but let each one of you be alone— / And stand together yet not too near together / For the pillars of the temple stand apart, / and the oak tree and the cypress / grow not in each other’s shadow.” I know this. I know that I come from strong, loving roots. This is what moves me to write about her and them.

PHOTO: The author and her mother at the seashore in Galveston, Texas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Inés Hernández-Ávila (Niimiipuu/Nez Perce and Tejana), Professor Emerita, Native American Studies, UC Davis, is enrolled with the Colville Confederated Tribes. A Ford Fellow, she is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She is a scholar-activist, poet, essayist, visual artist, translator, and a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, a group of Niimiipuu creative writers/language workers. Luk’upsíimey members are fusing language revitalization work and promotion with creative writing, performance, and publication. She is collaborating with the Library of Congress´s Hispanic Division, to include more Indigenous writers from Latin America in their Palabra archive. Her scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published widely. Her most recent publication (essay and poems) appears in The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States (literal publishing, 2024). Her painting, Coyote, Looking Deeply, is the cover art for Native American Rhetoric, ed. Lawrence Gross. Recently retired, she is loving the time she has to create. She is completing For the Nespelem Girl and the Cisco Kid: A Love Story (honoring her mom and dad), and her memoir, LuzEspiritu/SpiritLight.

Lifetime Difficulties by Julene Tripp Weaver (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Lifetime Difficulties
by Julene Tripp Weaver

My mother married an older man,
sixteen years her elder, she was nineteen.
She knew he would be her husband
the moment she saw him. She fulfilled
the role of a housewife, while she studied
stenography, Gregg and Pitman.

Early I learned my mother distrusted men.
She said they didn’t want women with big feet
who wore orthopedic shoes. She made chiffon
pies and celery boats. She bowled on a league
with my dad. They wed at a VFW hall. Pictures
show her standing on the grass, my father

on the sidewalk making him look taller.
She was fearful of thunder and lightning.
She never read to me, but said my classes
were too hard. She wrote her name everywhere
around the house, on mail, magazines, random
pieces of paper. She had nice handwriting.

On the side of their bed she explained how
she planned eight years between my sister and I—
showed me her diaphragm in its round case.
My mother repeated words. Diaphragm, eight
years. I wondered, why eight? Once she gave
away a rat terrier my father bought,

she didn’t like the label rat and it ran under
her feet. She lost her mother, then her husband
at age thirty-three, moved in with her brother.
I learned she could not live alone. She gave up
driving after Daddy died. She’d been a good
swimmer, on the Dolphin team

in high school, but she never swam again.
Never put on the lilac dress she looked beautiful
wearing. She pulled herself together for the funerals.
After, she put butter in her hair to protect herself
from the stylists and stopped bathing
till she smelled.

After Uncle died, my little sister got help,
we learned her diagnosis was schizophrenia,
She’d always had a busy mind filled with voices.
She stopped going to outpatient care,
became suicidal on Haldol, with its
serious side effects.

My sister moved her in with her after three attempts.
My mother threw away her knives, candles, anything
she thought dangerous. I remember when she tried
to throw my friend down our stairway in Queens.
How my mother said I was a difficult child,
but she was the tortured one.

PHOTO: Page of shorthand notes by Robyn Mackenzie.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mother died in 2017, the same month my third poetry book was released revealing my status as a long-term survivor of AIDS; a fact I choose not to share with my mother. The year before, for my mother’s 85th birthday, I visited her with my sister at the nursing home where she lived her last years after a stroke. It was the final time I saw her alive. When she was actively dying I had my first panic attack and a depression that lasted several months, I lost 25 pounds. It was hard to know if what I was experiencing was due to my book release or the grief of my mother’s death. Because I never had the kind of relationship with her I longed for, and because we fought through my teens, I never felt close, so the emotional reaction was a surprise. No doubt it was a combination, but I realized the enormous grief I held about the loss of a mother I’ve felt my whole life.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: A photo from my childhood, after my sister was born. To the right is my mother’s mother, who was with us on a road trip. I’m standing between my grandmother and mother. Guessing it’s 1961 or 62.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julene Tripp Weaver, a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle, Washington, worked in AIDS services for 21 years. Her third poetry collection, truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, and won the Bisexual Book Award. Slow Now With Clear Skies, published by MoonPath Press, was released in April 2024. Widely published, her poems can be found in HEAL, Mad Swirl, Anti-Heroin Chic, Feels Blind, and in two recent anthologies, I Sing the Salmon Home and Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice. Find more of her writing at julenetrippweaver.com. She’s on on Instagram  @julenet.weaver.

Author photo in Vashon Art Gallery (Seattle, Washington)
by June Sekiguchi.

Mother’s Memory Book by Tina Harrach Denetclaw (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Mother’s Memory Book
by Tina Harrach Denetclaw

when my firstborn brother flashed
toothy wet toddler grins
his liquid dark eyes glistened with delight
and curiosity and knowing

he sat on the floor and pried open
five metal rings
mom’s only cookbook

1953, red and white gingham
Better Homes and Gardens
fluid line drawings scattering flair
amidst pages of text and measures

his small fingers’ new skill
for punched hole papers and sentry rings
moved gathered pages
one place to another

There, he said, and snapped
five rings of binder closed
mom left those pages      where he put them
That’s where he thought they should be

this tattered tome of grape jelly meatballs
and molded green salad
since passed into my home

browsing through

time-capsule of food culture
tender moment each time
I find
a page out of
                                           place

PHOTOS: Vintage Better Homes & Gardens Cook Book by Patrick Q. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Mom always seemed to know what would be important over time: when to take pictures; which young man would become her son-in-law; the unfamiliar baby blanket she left in my linen closet before she passed. That precious snuggle waited among my linens 14 years for my brother’s first grandchild to be born. God’s angels, no doubt, whispering in my mother’s ear.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Mom on her wedding day with her sister, Shirley. I would wear that wedding dress 27 years later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tina Harrach Denetclaw lives in California’s San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and five cats. A clinical pharmacist specialized in critical care and emergency medicine, she is new to the world of poetry writing. Silver Birch Press gave home to her first published poem in its SPICES AND SEASONINGS Series; Eclectica Magazine welcomed the second.

She Promised Us Each a Quilt by Gabby Gilliam (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

She Promised Us Each a Quilt
by Gabby Gilliam

The pain in my mother’s wrists
doesn’t discriminate––throbbing
within taut tissue as she pulls
another stretch of quilt across
the sewing machine’s arm.

Since my father’s funeral
she has attacked her fabric stash
a torrent of stitches to distract her
from his absence. She lets his loss
pool in the shadows at her feet
nudges it aside to press the pedal
as she feeds pinned squares
to the needle. When the sun dips
below the treeline, she leans
over to turn on the light.

PAINTING: Patchwork quilt, watercolor by Undrey.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My parents would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in November 2023, but we lost my dad in 2021. Since then, my mother has spent every day distracting herself from the emptiness in their house. She’s turned their living room into a sewing room––fabric and batting all over the place. She’s given herself a mission to make a quilt for each of us (daughters and grandchildren). She’s nearly half-way finished.

PHOTO: The author (right) with her mother at her wedding in 2010.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother made this quilt for my son. It’s been in use ever since she made it for him. My mom chose the center panel because my son loves to read, and was making his own books for a short time. She then went through her stash of scrap fabrics to find coordinating colors and patterns to use for the rest of the quilt. She does her best to make all of the quilts with fabric she already has on hand, as she wants to work her way through her impressive inventory instead of buying anything new. If she gave herself over to quilting completely, she could likely finish one in a week or so, but she often works on them in between other projects, so it’s sometimes a couple of months before she finishes one. There are usually a few quilts in progress at a time, one being cut, one being pinned, and one being sewn. She will likely take a break from quilting soon as she finds it harder to sew in the warm weather and is most productive in the winter months, the cold and darkness much better sewing companions than the light.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gabby Gilliam is a writer, an aspiring teacher, and a mom. She lives in the Washington DC metro area with her husband and son. Her poetry has appeared in One Art, Anti-Heroin Chic, Plant-Human Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Vermillion, Deep Overstock, Spank the Carp, and others. Her fiction has appeared in Grim & Gilded and multiple anthologies. You can find her online at gabbygilliam.com or on Facebook.