Two from The Land of Missing Children by Carole Symer

Art by Monica Banks

Ars Poetica w/Oxygen Tank

a slow gesture at first      I start w/my sad girl face    Mama’s wan smile
that boys fall for     the coldness of her waves     the sheer drop
of my eight-year-old chilly prophecy    not knowing better    I jump into Sister’s burning lake    
grabbing her wrists    oxygen tank on my back     exit plan in place      every single time
 it hurt to watch     Sister surrender whatever     loss of tongue     in the shape of a gun
or was it a ballpoint swept from her hand      & other ghosts      changing us beyond perception  
like Mama back on meds    how I used to cry   an artificial reservoir    my heart a massive crater   
wild pink & orange verbs     a set of goggles & instructions    for diving into a sunset   if you’re lucky
you don’t forget    that pain unleashed the people we were     living on beer & houseboats       
Mama getting the upper hand again   I mean what phase of over were we    turning the bed this way  
or that     after our myths       blew up      & there’s me      a wordless body      
crying at a paper wall    wanting to be somebody else       playing dead   
as Sister circles her wreckage    for someone to believe her     I dive deeper      to write my turbulent
wake     where her fiery wounds pool     ink like pinpricks     I keep my legs moving

 

Dear Carole, 

(TAT Card 17GF: A woman standing on a bridge, looking down at a body of water)

I see you there teetering on a bridge, sack of skin, half an eye on the deflating
earth as you cry Mother & imagine falling into her pulsing sun heat pouncing
off you in waves in waves of solar flares & other unconscious collections of
chemical reactivity, in the not what you think—that’s my job!—but what
history the child crawled into behind the scenes, the primal scene as in the
greater the resistance the hotter you flicker […] don’t Baby Doll oh Baby me
in your gentle-down-the-stream baby soft gurgling over that vat of man sweat
you think so sexy—I got big ideas too!—while in your femme fatale version
you make men bicker over who gets to steal your storm, your hard-wiring, your
please hang up, your red hot now go wash your mouth out and so you wash
your hands of the army of mothers kneeling in kitchens, minding the women-
winds you say awakened your squeaky clean touch of a mother’s meditation,
a nursery rhyme whispering you alive at six years old, wooing you into another
time zone, her intervals of kindness, her clap of thunder alive inside your plush
blankie, as you bisect her dreamy shadows, the scent of her say […] like her
hands cupped around your cheeks, mouth agape, naming your weather system,
unafraid because she doesn’t know the ending of your story, because she died
before you got to the last page, because you don’t know her goodnight moon
milk is already inside you even if she won’t hear you sliding out of bed this
time, out of her fantastical clutch, turning the page on this merrily-merrily-life-
is-but-a-dream body, born on a boat filled with unimaginative, fanatical British
immigrants, your ancestors, bruised & famished, because a siren cries your
mother’s ghost inside your seething flesh, her heavy breath left unannounced
in the unnavigable slow curve of the wrist, waist, knee & neck of a mother, as
she goes sizzling out, say it my Darling, say […] in reach of the body we are
all the shape of a woman’s desire.

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