Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Finch, Annie

214           volume 1,  number 1
Now in November, as I face towards home
pulling my living behind me, and my dead,
the skulls of fire widen into a road.
November turns into a room of leaves
and lets them fall around him.  Then he goes,
and where he stood, his body blank and bare,
only a halo of shocked twigs remains
spread on the still green, still elusive grass.
annie finch
Now in November
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...


English

Now in November

Kennedy, Sarah

 journal of the motherhood initiative            1 
They’re drowning me out, even though I keep
my shovel lying here, its hollow broad
enough to slap bodies into the wood
of the porch.  I haven’t done my duty,
haven’t shellacked my siding to that gloss,
that impenetrable American
shine.  And here they come, as industrious
as Puritans, drilling perfect noxious
holes into my non-toxic walls.  One more
spring of their trembling wings, another mark
against me, one at the left shoulder, one
at the right, my dark angels, both whispering
I’m failing—the whole world loves its poisons—
flailing to nail them dead against the boards.
sarah kennedy
The Carpenter Bees


The Carpenter Bees

Murray, Lee

Secrets of an "Illegitimate Mom"

O'Donnell, Angela Alaimo

98           volume 1,  number 2  journal of the motherhood initiative            99 
angela alaimo o’donnell
Homegoing
I was there. I had my existence. 
Me in place and the place in me.
   —Seamus Heaney
We drove those roads as if we’d always known them,
the steep ways and winding bends amazing us
at every easy turn, and all the world we’d left
behind so green, we’d forgotten how deep
the earth could be.  You’ll be late for your own
funeral, our mother used to warn us,
three daughters who disregarded time
as if its hours bound all others but ourselves.
And there we were, driving fast, her ashes
stashed in the hatch, as late for her interment
as our own, resisting the pull of the place 
we’d begun, the place she was going back to be,
the small hole nicked in familiar ground,
home, three feet square and three feet down.


Homegoing

Kearney, Kerri S.

Bailey, Lucy E.

An Adoptive Mother's Reflections on Mothering and Grief: Another Voice from Inside the Adoption Triad

270           volume 1,  number 2
Editor’s Notes
I’m pleased to introduce a selection of Katherine Smith’s “Fables” for this is-
sue of Folio. “Fables” explores the rich and sometimes painfully complicated 
journey that is motherhood, one vividly reflected and refracted through the 
voices of narrators both real and imagined. In these deeply interior poems, 
Smith reveals the darker shadows of our lives, shining light on the shadows 
that fall between mothers and their children. Smith’s speakers mourn the loss 
of the autonomous self and pays tribute, too, to the struggles of the child, whose 
independent journey leads to a destiny beyond the maternal embrace. 
In “Why I Am a Realist,” the speaker reflects on the ways she has aban-
doned others to preserve herself—ways that she has strayed from the “mater-
nal.” These memories—“leaving a grown man/alone in his apartment in Paris 
in August” or galloping “a grey horse across dazzling frost” to escape into 
“winter’s world while my mother slept/off the bottle of barbiturates”—soon 
give way to a darker revelation. “It doesn’t matter,” the speaker admits, as she 
considers the forgotten cause that prompted her to drag her thirteen year-old 
daughter back from a friend’s house. “What matters,” she insists, is that for 
three years after/not a dawn rose when I didn’t wake knowing/I was a person 
who could slap a child hard.” This new self-knowledge engenders a watchful-
ness that recalibrates the mother/daughter relationship. Smith’s speaker con-
siders this new reality with measured grace, noting that she wouldn’t have her 
daughter forget that protective rage “anymore than I’d have only the pink/of 
apple blossoms without the undertone/or the pale cream of bowls in a still 
life by Morandi.” 
Through the voices of fictionalized mothers—Rebecca, Sarah, Laura, De-
meter—we see the ways that practical considerations often put a mother’s 
 journal of the motherhood initiative            271 
desires and ambitions into conflict with her duties. About “Fables,” Kather-
ine Smith writes, “The self—even the mother’s self—has limits, boundaries, 
borders: between selflessness and unconditional love and self-preservation. 
Mothers, in small and large ways, push the boundary between these, and, 
depending on the actual conditions of a woman’s life, crossing the border be-
tween self and selflessness can either be blissful or lethal . . . My poems reflect 
this crossing between the real and the imaginary, self and other, memory and 
forgetfulness.”
Throughout this powerful and deeply empathetic sequence, we also en-
counter moments of consolation where the beauty of the natural world in-
spires a kind of faith, where the baby cradled inside a jacket “on endless walks 
through past the black swan in the Buttes-Chaumont” now “drives a car 
through the American suburbs” and “the real flowers/into myth” (“Miracle 
I”). Elsewhere, a woman sits quietly in the Blue Ridge Mountains, trying 
to free her mind from “the kind of trouble a woman/who’s raised children 
on her own can feel.” The timelessness of the mountains inspires a “reso-
luteness”— “a little more dignity than I came with,” something that “won’t 
change or break—/no vein of ore, nothing men might obtain/by destruction.” 
In this momentary peace, she finds emblems of endurance: “the only richness 
the wind/in wild wheat and the hawks circling above me” (“Woman Alone 
on the Mountain”).
Katherine Smith’s first book of poetry, Argument by Design, was published 
in 2003. Her poems and prose have appeared recently or are forthcoming in 
Ploughshares, Fiction International, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta 
Review, Natural Bridge, and The Laurel Review. A Tennessean, she currently 
teaches at Montgomery College in Germantown, Maryland and serves as 
poetry editor for The Potomac Review.
        
             —Jane Satterfield
editor’s note


Editor's Notes

Sharkey, Donna

The War in Sierra Leone, its Aftermath, and Women’s Resilience: One Mother’s Narrative

Smith, Katherine

276           volume 1,  number 2
katherine smith
Border
Through sheet metal and barbed wire, 
the children blaze across the Rio, 
fierce heat of a desert afternoon, 
sweating like so much glistening citrus, 
sweet figs, shining grapes, their eyes ripe fruit 
on the border’s abandoned table. Tonight 
in the desert a woman hesitates
to plot a fresh garden beneath stars
that pour sour milk across a dry winter sky;
then, liquid as Earth, memory of a thirsty child
washes her over the burning fence.


Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Not a member yet

Now in November

The Carpenter Bees

Secrets of an "Illegitimate Mom"

Homegoing

An Adoptive Mother's Reflections on Mothering and Grief: Another Voice from Inside the Adoption Triad

Editor's Notes

The War in Sierra Leone, its Aftermath, and Women’s Resilience: One Mother’s Narrative

Border

Losing The "Normal" Child: Ramifications for Middle-Class Mothers

Episodes on High F

1,574

1,824