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

Chase, Ferzana

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative          285 
medical offices, hospitals, institutions, and “special” schools. Seen only as a 
person with cerebral palsy, Jacobson’s various abilities were virtually ignored. 
She questions whether or not the goals and expectations she had for herself 
would have been different had she not been labeled “severely disabled” and is 
highly opposed to labeling anyone, especially David, “severely disabled.”
Non-disabled individuals often take their independence for granted, es-
pecially since they do not have caregivers in their lives. Jacobson strives for 
independence and her resistance towards her au pair is a sign of determina-
tion and motivation. However, the more Jacobson attempts to resist her need 
for care, the more she realizes how demanding a baby can be. Here, the issue 
of care versus choice arises as the interdependence of care limits life choices 
for those who are disabled.
Understandably, in light of her despair and isolation as a child, Jacobson 
was hesitant to start a family. However, with encouragement from her hus-
band and faith in her Jewish religion, Jacobson’s journey through adoption 
led her into the intimate world of mothering. When questions of disability 
and mothering arose, through moments of panic and excitement, Jacobson 
bravely faced her own insecurities.
In advance of adopting their son, Jacobson and her husband chose to name 
him David. They chose this special name to carry on the Jewish tradition of 
naming a child after a deceased family member. Jacobson’s book also evokes 
her strong emotional ties with her late mother, a bond that provided the im-
petus she needed to start her own family. When she lost her beloved mother, 
Jacobson became even more determined to build a foundation for David filled 
with support, care, and, most of all, unconditional love.
Denise Jacobson struggles to show the world that she is good enough to be 
a daughter, a wife, and a mother—a whole person of strength and determina-
tion. Against all odds, she does not give up and realizes her desire to become 
a mother. 
Call Me Okaasan: 
Adventures in Multicultural Mothering
Suzanne Kamata, ed. 
Oregon: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2009.
Reviewed by Ferzana Chase
Call Me Okaasan : Adventures in Multicultural Mothering includes twenty-one 
thought-provoking essays on the mothering experiences of women bridging 
book reviews
286          volume 1, number 2
Both mothering and blogging are acts of perpetual reproduction and relation-
ship building. As Judith Stadtman Tucker states in the foreword to Mothering 
Mothering and Blogging:
The Radical Act of the MommyBlog
May Friedman and Shana Calixte, eds. 
Bradford, on: Demeter Press, 2009.
Reviewed by Kryn Freehling-Burton
multiple cultures while raising their children in mixed race unions. Emotions 
run close to the surface of these essays which describe the wonder and chal-
lenges of raising children in different cultures and countries and the lessons 
learnt in the process.
Some of the essays emphasize the enriching potential of mothering in a 
multicultural context. Bilingualism not only involves two languages but the 
understanding of two world views. Violeta Garca-Mendoza writes of the gift 
of bilingualism and biculturalism as the “magic of being able to go and come 
back constantly between place and time” (41). For Saffia Far, having her ba-
bies delivered in Kyrgyzstan made her appreciate her own health and enjoy 
her pregnancy away from the “obsessive commercialism of the West” (36). 
Katherine Barrett’s temporary stay in South Africa gave her an enhanced 
awareness and sensitivity for other mothers for whom mothering in the midst 
of violence and poverty was everyday reality. Leza Lowitz’s piece reminds us 
of how beautiful it can be when two cultures wholeheartedly embrace a child 
and how a multiracial child can, in turn, overcome the limitations of culture 
to accept the best of all worlds.
Immigrant mothers struggle with their children’s inability to understand 
their world views. Some fear their children’s loss of language; others obsess 
over food and music. At the heart of the collection lies the maternal desire 
to fill the child’s life with the language, food, and culture that shaped the 
mother’s life but which now seem far removed from the child’s everyday ex-
perience.
When children are raised in multiple cultures there is also a fear that they 
may not fully adapt to any one culture. Some mothers are anxious to help their 
children meet the challenge of trying to straddle multiple cultures and learn 
multiple languages. As the collection shows, however, many of the mothers 
—not their children—cleave to the past and are bound by their own fears. 
The mothers themselves need to see the beauty in their present lives and their 
children often serve as their guides.


English

Call me Okasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering

Smith, Katherine

282           volume 1,  number 2
katherine smith
Demeter
Since looking has taken the place of thinking,
she’s tempted to jettison the poetry.
She sweeps Helen Vendler and Susan Sontag
into a cardboard box. So many glass baubles
she can’t bring herself to throw away. She
carries the books to the basement, clearing
the house before putting it up for sale. Then
she carries the pine bookshelves, lighter
than she remembers, down the stairs.
The living room looks brighter,
shorn of books, like a lamb. On the coffee table
she throws down fistfuls of paint chips
for the new house. How slow the mind moves
at times, a procession formal as tragedy,
she says to no one, fanning the shades
of apricot on the table like a deck of cards,
closing her eyes to choose the color for the new
living room, placing her fingertip on the palest,
almost white, tint of pink, the color 
of her daughter’s winter pale flesh.


Demeter

Satterfield, Jane

Folio
Supporters of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at a demonstration in front  of a 
church where the people involved in the “Disappearances” were attending mass.  
Photo: Gerardo dell’Orto
216           volume 1,  number 1
Editor’s Notes
It’s a great pleasure to feature Kathryn Rhett’s “Book of Hours” for this issue of 
Folio. In this richly textured sequence of poems, the poet meditates on singular, 
evanescent moments to capture the vibrant passage of the seasons and the stark 
grace of embodied knowledge: “I once was sure and certain/ as a stone//(or the 
way that sounds)/,” she writes, “my body yet to multiply/and wander.” 
Composed against the backdrop of a Civil War battlefield where the poet’s 
family makes their home, a mother weathers a daughter’s terrifying convul-
sions and fainting spells, a deeply felt individual drama with vivid archetypal 
resonance. Rhett’s attention to detail is uncannily precise and painterly, re-
calling the dailiness of medieval texts where lush imagery accrues to compose 
place, time, and endeavor. Entering the hushed space of these poems, we 
encounter “leaves like miniature red scythes”; a newborn who “traps her small 
flying hand with her mouth”; “red-washed silks of cardinals”; “worn-through 
t-shirts/of old snow,” and “gardens made/dormant and lustrous by ice.” Each 
time the daughter convulses and faints (“eyes closed against the dark wood of 
the world”), her mother is drawn back, through memory (“the verdigris un-
consciousness/of before, before, before”) to the difficult birth her child barely 
survived. 
Rhett considers this troubling experience through the lens of art and myth: 
the daughter vanished “into a hazel wood/from which sticks are cut/for beat-
ing or divining” as if “she might be flattened there,/in a perpetual suggestive 
inaction” before she re-emerges “in a violent burst of consciousness,” prompt-
ing the poet to ask “(How did Persephone return to earth?)/she slammed into 
the world again.” 
While the beauty of the natural world affords wonder, the poet/mother 
navigates a reality where “green thorns in clouds insects fly through” will 
“some mornings seem part of a dream/in an ahistorical Bohemia” and on 
others will “lash the trees,/bind the woods back/like the stark limitations of 
hours.” The dangers of living and loving stand out in sharp relief: an infant 
son’s cold is a reminder of the nearness of physical extinction; elsewhere, divi-
sions form among family members whose “selves flashed in and out/of a mean 
obscurity.” Epiphanies arrive unasked for and must be honored before “the 
twilight cold/begins, and/banks and fractures us.” 
 journal of the motherhood initiative            217 
Kathryn Rhett is the author of Near Breathing: A Memoir of a Difficult Birth. 
Her poems and essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard 
Review, Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan 
Quarterly Review, the New York Times, and elsewhere. An associate professor 
at Gettysburg College and as a faculty member of the low-residency mfa 
program at Queens University in Charlotte, Rhett is currently at work on a 
memoir about living in Barcelona. 
Describing her process, Rhett recalls learning about books of hours in a 
college art history survey class. “In a dark auditorium,” she says, “we saw 
bright slides of ‘The Very Rich Hours of the Duc de Berry,’ made by the 
Flemish painters known as the Limbourg Brothers in 1416. The calendar 
pages, an addition to the standard prayer pages, struck me most, highly de-
tailed miniature paintings of ordinary people engaged in seasonal activities.” 
In her own “Book of Hours” the poet’s temporal journey reflects a conscious-
ness vividly shaped by art and motherhood. Time’s passing is its own reward: 
where a younger self breezes through a gallery, “hip cocked, pausing for an/
intellectual moment,” the older one has trained her eye to find the visionary 
in the ordinary.      
             —Jane Satterfield
editor’s note
218           volume 1,  number 1  journal of the motherhood initiative            219 


Editor’s Notes

Wong-Wylie, reviewed by Gina

book reviews
 journal of the motherhood initiative            237 
Raising Kids in the 21st Century: 
The Science of Psychological Health for Children 
Sharon K. Hall. 
Hoboken, nj: John Wiley and Sons, 2008.
Reviewed by Gina Wong-Wylie
In Raising Kids in the 21st Century, Sharon K. Hall describes seven attributes 
of psychologically healthy children, which she refers to as “good Ph.” In this 
highly accessible book, Hall cites earlier research on socialization and cogni-
tive growth to emphasize the importance of raising children who will con-
tribute to their community and larger society. She aptly states, “[h]ealthy, 
happy people who can connect well with others, see others’ perspective with 
tolerance, and care about their world” (2). 
Although she clearly indicates that her book was written for White, mid-
dle-class families, Hall acknowledges families across a range of cultural and 
ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic status, physical ability, and sexual ori-
entation. She also cites research on key factors that buffer children who face 
risk and vulnerability (i.e., divorce, poverty, death of a loved one) with good 
outcomes: “a positive temperament, a normal level of intelligence, one good 
parent, one good external resource such as a teacher, and one positive context 
external to the home such as functioning well at school” (9). Hall asserts that 
socio-emotional growth of an individual begins in the home and that parents 
are the foundation and template through which children experience all other 
relationships. 
Hall emphasizes the pivotal role of parents in modelling good coping strat-
egies, imparting the value of family relationships, individual responsibility, 
and high academic expectations, along with providing a feeling of warmth 
and safety to promote good Ph and resiliency. Good parents create a “virtu-
ous circle” (iv): when their children become parents themselves, they go on 
to raise happy and engaged children who become thriving adults and social 
activists. 
Hall’s work is flawed in several respects. She focuses a good portion of 
her book on developmental tasks, cognitive functioning, skills, and motor 
development in children. I skimmed these sections in favour of the sections 
on childrearing, which were richly grounded in classic research and included 
useful, practical ideas. Surprisingly, Hall does not address the timely issue of 
raising environmentally astute children. Finally, the writing is at times pre-
scriptive, which is too directed for this reader.
Nonetheless, the book’s final chapter on social justice and global awareness 
is novel and broadens the existing conceptions of parenting. Hall stresses 
book reviews
238           volume 1,  number 1
the elemental importance of adventure, humour, fun, light-heartedness, and 
laughter in raising children. Overall, this is a book I will recommend to cul-
turally similar middle-class parents, teachers, clients, or practitioners working 
with families interested in enhancing child development and engendering 
psychological health in children.
Insane Euphoria Speaks: Diary of a Late Pregnancy 
Katherine Dickson. 
Bloomington, in: Xlibris, 2007.
Reviewed by Alison M. S. Watson
This is not an advice book for the growing number of women seeking to 
give birth later in life. Instead, it is an account of Katherine Dickson’s third 
pregnancy during the period 21 May 1971 to 9 March 1972. In recount-
ing her personal journey, the author is unflinching in the way she lets the 
reader into her home and her private thoughts, with her emotions veering 
between joy and frustration over the course of a single day. This sometimes 
leads to an uneven writing style that nonetheless adds to the force of the 
narrative.
The author’s relationship with her husband, Frank, is fraught; as she ad-
mits, “you can almost make it heaven or hell” (20). On the one hand, she is 
very much in love with him and believes he treats her well; on the other hand, 
she is frustrated with his work and home habits, believes he is undermining 
her and makes her feel unwelcome in her own home. Her relationship with 
her children (her two existing children, and the one she is carrying) appears 
similarly uneven. She either loves her children completely or seeks solitude to 
discover a suitable outlet for her own creative energies.
What is particularly fascinating about this book is the way it stands as a 
representation of the changing place of women in society in the early 1970s. 
Feminist thought and philosophy have immediacy and substance for Dickson 
and her friends. Not only is she faced with the everyday demands of being a 
wife and mother—and indeed of being a “good” wife and mother—but she 
feels the need to meet societal expectations for women.
Although this book was published in 2007, readers do not learn what hap-
pened to Dickson and her family in the years that follow her diary entries. 
Readers yearn to know more about her relationship with her children, for 
example. Did her marriage to Frank succeed? The blurb on the back cover 
would suggest that it has, but Dickson experiences so many frustrations in 
her marriage that one wonders whether they were resolved, especially in light 
of Frank’s own reservations about his role as husband.


Raising Kids in the 21st Century: The Science of Psychological Health for Children

Davidson, Deborah

Stahls, Helena

Maternal Grief: Creating an Environment for Dialogue

Stitt, Jocelyn Fenton

A Gold Star for Grieving: Cindy Sheehan, Military Families Speak Out, and Gold Star Families Speak Out

Gustafson, reviewed by Diana L.

 journal of the motherhood initiative            235 
Book Reviews
Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: 
World War I and the Politics of Grief
Suzanne Evans.  
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Diana L. Gustafson
Every Remembrance Day, as the television broadcasts solemn crowds gather-
ing at monuments and cemeteries in a collective display of respect and hon-
our, I pause with other Canadians to remember those who died in war and 
the veterans who survived past and current conflicts. As the daughter of a 
military man, I was taught to take pride in Canada’s contributions to war 
efforts and peacekeeping. As a mother and grandmother, however, I am un-
settled by images of women laying wreaths in honour of children lost at war. 
Thanks to a finely crafted book, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World 
War I and the Politics of Grief, written by academic and journalist Suzanne 
Evans, I am beginning to understand my mixed feelings about war and the 
role of mothers in the political agenda of war. 
Evans offers a meticulously researched examination of the role that mothers 
play in nation-building during war times and in post-war commemorations. 
Although the focus of her work is World War I, Evans provides rich histori-
cal and cross-cultural context to show how governments have mobilized the 
image of the mother for political and military ends. 
In the first chapter, Evans looks at the origins and shifting meanings of the 
concept of martyrdom in Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Sikh traditions. She 
distinguishes between suicide—an act that is generally regarded as “unaccept-
able” in these religious traditions—and martyrdom— the discourse surround-
ing a hero’s story of accepting death for him/herself or dying in the name of 
God or country (14). The telling and retelling of a hero’s story influences 
how people think, strengthens collective pride and religious loyalties within 
a community (15). The mother who bears witness to her child’s conviction 
book reviews
236           volume 1,  number 1
comes to represent the martyr whose quiet courage and sacrifice shock and 
challenge men in the community to act honourably by going to war. Evans 
introduces the stories of mothers, including the Maccabean mother of seven 
sons, the Virgin Mary, Fatima, Al-Khansa, and Mata Gujari, to illustrate the 
power and possibilities of exploiting the maternal relationship during times 
of conflict. 
The second chapter examines the concept of the hero/martyr as it was vari-
ously represented in political cartoons and newspaper articles in World War I. 
Evans argues that the images and language of Christian sacrifice were key to 
constructing the German enemy as evil incarnate in opposition to peace-lov-
ing, self-sacrificing British and Canadian soldiers. Religious icons and nation-
alistic paintings—Charles Sim’s “Sacrifice”—along with stories of atrocities 
committed against women and children—including the execution of British 
nurse Edith Cavell—galvanized two messages: women, like children, were 
vulnerable and in need of protection, and the ultimate evil had to be countered 
by the ultimate sacrifice, a willingness to die for God and country.
In the third chapter, Evans shows how militancy and motherhood were 
amalgamated in World War I propaganda directed at Canadian women 
during enlistment drives. She draws on published sources and letters from 
women to illustrate how mothers were called upon to sacrifice their most 
precious possession, their children. Mothers were urged to serve God and 
uphold the honour and traditions of their country by encouraging their sons 
to serve as soldiers in defense of truth and nation. Thus, mothers became 
secular symbols of Canadian ideals and cultural teachers capable of showing 
a nation how to be honourable, uncomplaining, and unselfish contributors to 
the war effort. 
Chapters four and five look at how maternal sacrifice in World War I has 
been commemorated in Remembrance Day rituals, commonwealth ceme-
teries, and by monuments such as Allward’s “The Spirit of Canada.” Evans 
shows how commemorative work preserves and shapes a particular unified 
public memory of war, uniting past and present political convictions in acts 
reminiscent of liturgical rituals. In these post-war spaces, the image of moth-
ers “exists within the balance of remembering and forgetting,” converting 
grief and mourning into pride and joy in sacrifice in the interests of social 
stability (139). 
One need not be a war historian to appreciate Evans’s artful and nuanced 
treatment of a subject that has received scant attention. Scholars and students 
of mothering and women’s studies, political science, history, and religious 
studies are among those who will be challenged by Evans’s argument. Her 
book offers a welcome reexamination of militarism and the mobilization of 
mothering discourses, the construction and exploitation of gendered bound-
aries, the memorialisation of mothers’ extraordinary loss as glory, and the 
inglorious language and images invoked in the name of God and nation to 
justify the horrific violence of war. 


Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief

Souffrant, Leah

Blood Mother and The King: Poems

Wheeler, Lesley

170           volume 1,  number 1  journal of the motherhood initiative            171 
Asha the elephant, stained 
with red Virginia clay, 
lifts her ears toward the falling 
clamor. Love begins again and again, 
even in cages.  
Like a hot sandcastle, the cougar 
crumbles onto his grumbling 
mate, gold over brown.  
Their landslide rouses the whole 
plantation. One human family leans 
agape; the fence brands them.
Unnamed bear cubs, boozy
with milk, wait to be sold.
 
Asha’s baby watches a man harness 
an old mattress to his dam’s back.  
White children clamber on. Asha feels 
along the platform with her trunk,
touches a human mother’s sneaker.
No one hears what she’s trying to say.  
lesley wheeler
Breeder Zoo


Breeder Zoo

Rhett, Kathryn

218           volume 1,  number 1  journal of the motherhood initiative            219 
Book of Hours
kathryn rhett
Leaves like miniature red scythes or boomerangs scattered.
A yellow peel spirals off the blade.
The tears of Republican women as they clutch in gold-buttoned suits.
The you of you coming home, smoke out of the scorched air.
A sheet corner sprouts like a fleur-de-lis into the room.
The touching, the folding like a triptych shut, the sightless pleasure.
The child growing larger by the hour, as if birth were endless.
She traps her small flying hand with her mouth.
kathryn rhett
220           volume 1,  number 1
***
My daughter is eight now—
she won’t be taken from me.
She is solid, real.
With Botticelli hair she swims in the forest still.
Once, morphine flew her through the dark.
Her eyes closed against the dark wood of the world.
(Here, this is what you must enter through—
a long blackness of harsh breathing,
being summoned to a far, daylit field.)
The forest is attached to her.
Sometimes she falls back in—
succumbing to convulsions,
her limbs in a filmy, suffocating garment.
Mother, father,
don’t make me come out
with wide hazel eyes
and a panicked, sideways glance—
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            221 
***
As if she could vanish into a hazel wood
from which sticks are cut
for beating or divining.
As if she might be flattened there,
in a perpetual suggestive inaction
in which flowers had just streamed 
from her lips
into the forest turning brown or green,
between a winter and fertility
all motion suspended
before, in a violent burst of consciousness
(How did Persephone return to earth?)
she slammed into the world again.
kathryn rhett
222           volume 1,  number 1
***
The world wanted her.
I cradled her across my lap.
The world wanted her
to stay in its rough circumstance:
but her breath fell, and her color fell away
as if something had taken
and turned her, the way a wind
reverses leaves,
to the verdigris unconsciousness
of before, before, before.
Awkwardly I carried her
up the hill to home.
Her legs dangled down.
Ungainly and tired from giving birth
to her brother,
I wished that I were stronger
to carry my girl in my arms
with a measure of dignity, 
or shelter.
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            223 
***
When her eyes open
as we kneel
time starts again; time starts
again for us, 
vigilant at a birth.
We might be statues, stilled
in the twirl of dust.
Her eyes flick, side to side;
she can’t remember where
she’s come from.
Once it was morning on the beige sofa—
her skin and the light
had a pale celery cast.
Once it was Christmas, amidst
the crumpled wrappings.
All the roses gone,
and a long, whitefaced journey back.
As an infant, her eyes were like a seer’s—
a glassy indigo, still of the dark
unphysical dream—
We dimmed the lights.
We would entice her to us.
To our cycles of planting seeds,
cutting flowers, tending
our gardens made
dormant and lustrous by ice.
kathryn rhett
224           volume 1,  number 1
***
Trompe l’oeil
is what the region’s famous for—
Madonna in a niche on
the cathedral facade
being actually flat paint, or
stone window frames that aren’t.
The children disappearing
around corners
of the crooked-packed medieval
houses, with a flash
of white sock or blue shoulder,
pale squeak of sneaker.
Or they come out, preceded by
an orange plastic arrow,
shouts, a fusillade of steps—
they’re here, dimensional
until the stones and feline shadows
take their places. 
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            225 
***
We saw a painted Mary,
not holding her son
but waiting to.
In the dim upstairs exhibit
of carved, dwarf-sized statuary
made of fruitwood
three centuries before,
this is what I wanted:
stories that lasted.
As to why this was the story
of our lives
people believed in
I could not tell her.
In a darkness so gathered, enfolding
and old, beneath the cathedral ceiling;
in a darkness so deliberate
it seemed scripted,
dusted with the residue of ink, and smoke.
The dead Christ polychrome with blood.
Diminutive Mary, hands pinned to her sides
as if she would be helpless
even to receive him.
kathryn rhett
226           volume 1,  number 1
***
You have to know that I am older now—
my camera in a case,
the kids’ school pictures
in my wallet.
I came to see the “Primavera,” or
“Allegory of Spring,” to be precise,
in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
I hadn’t seen it for a long time,
except in books
and so I stood near
for a while, ignoring tour groups.
I’d paid my money, and just to see
the one painting, so I looked and looked
as if to store it, and still,
as before, the figure of the girl
arrested me—not Flora with her flowers
or Venus or the Graces, who all seem
bored, including Mercury—but the girl,
panicked, being lifted by the blueish
angel in the trees, who isn’t
an angel but the wind.
And what I’d never noticed were his wings.
Four long feathers gleaming
through the olive leaves.
They resembled bean pods, or catalpas
that rattle in a breeze when they dry up.
Or four blue swords shining,
taking the girl to her fate.
How could I not have seen?
(The younger me, that is,
with my hip cocked, pausing for an
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            227 
intellectual moment, headed for Greece
where I’d eat honey on the coast—
 is the future real, my son once asked—
  oh yes, oh yes)
This time I turned at last
to find my husband in the crowd,
and I squinted at the opposite wall.
A new painting hung there, or
rather, an old one, restored in the years
between my visits, an “Annunciation”
(there are so many), but in this one
the angel has green wings, green
as infant grass or a lily’s
elongated bud, holding all that
shimmers inside—
I told my husband of the wings,
the death wings, and the birth wings
that reminded me of Hopkins’ line
“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”—
but in those moments of waking
it’s just as if an angel comes to you
because no one else can hear.
kathryn rhett
228           volume 1,  number 1
***
I meant to speak only of angels,
yet they resemble so much else
 (& of course it is expected that I see them,
 being visionary)
white sails approaching port, or
migratory birds returning
sheets shook out on a balcony,
two hands, a swan,
the snowy cape
of a plague inspector, his paper
beak stuffed full of flowers,
knocking at houses
for the hidden blackened ones.
I meant to speak only of fortune—
I once was sure and certain
as a stone
 (or the way that sounds)
my body yet to multiply
and wander. 
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            229 
***
Green thorns
in ground-tied clouds
thicken the woods.
Running on the fire road,
I see water-filled depressions
struck with chalk, or milk.
The still gray pools unapparent
at first, below
sand shoulders
glazed with snow
at the bottom of the green
particle-storm of woods.
I run away from the box-house
and back again
on tangents.
Green thorns in clouds insects fly through
some mornings seem part of a dream
in an ahistorical Bohemia,
ground-tied weightless needles.
Other days they lash the trees,
bind the woods back
like the stark limitations of hours.
kathryn rhett
230           volume 1,  number 1
***
A flesh-giving sun
lit the white-gold branches.
They were the color of weightless
pistachio shells, tossed up into blue.
We climbed the stairs for breakfast
into a skylit room.
In the woods, brushed silver along the tree roots
lit up distances.
The worn-through t-shirts
of old snow persisted.
Red-washed silks of cardinals
skimmed half-winged across and
were gone into thorns.
My husband and daughter
played hide-and-seek in the yard.
Last week our selves flashed in and out
of a mean obscurity
but now we seemed laid open and mild.
Our necks bending to fit.
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            231 
***
This morning, motion—
two brown fur-feathered ducks
in the bottom-water
make abrupt directional turns,
the tails hinging around,
steering through links between ponds.
Their beaks of polished wood.
The water now virginally fluid.
The air runs thicker with birds and buds,
chalky claws on the branch ends.
The past is hardly past.
Our child replaces herself over time
and is more than accumulation.
The red ground-leaves,
iced and blown, are
breaking down to soil.
The night sky dry and boned with branches.
kathryn rhett
232           volume 1,  number 1
***
They are sleeping,
finally stilled
when I check them
one last time.
My nightgown in the nightlight’s
golden seeded glow
swings into shadows
as if a fire
jumps in the room.
In the room made small
by the small light:
a fire in the cave.
folio
 journal of the motherhood initiative            233 
***
Freight cars creak by in the dark
behind the yard.
Our son snuffles with a first cold.
One a.m.  I’ve finished work.
Waking up these days, I lapse
back, as with one arm
flung for the first backstroke
to the water of dreams, whole stories.
A color orange, an urge to kiss you—
it’s too soft, 
a remnant; shaken off.
kathryn rhett
234           volume 1,  number 1
***
The horse against the sun
is lined with fire.
My daughter rides her
western-style,
heels down,
hips easy in the saddle.
She used to toss her head
when she kicked that reddish horse—
a flourish, an italic
emphasis.
Now she tilts her face
up steadily, and the sun
gilds her laughing, 
wheeling around the ring
in figure eights.
The sun sinks on spindles.
A white goose
cranks from the far field.
I see the body radiant
as a November day shuts its gate—
girl and horse a thin corona
before the fence.
Before the twilight cold
begins, and
banks and fractures us.
