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.

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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).

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.