Poetry |

from The Broken Mother Sonnets

 

Time is a gesture spinning and which way is bluest?

I followed pain horizontally toward whatever felt

newest and was lost and lost. Lyn says, there are many

weathers. Makes sense, like many angers. Distances

are crushing and mountains figure themselves and

smoke is hung as a familiar city is surely ruined

inside me. I am singular in the world now, left broken

by the broken. And remember the strange economy

where a lover said, you’re worth so much, more than any other,

said, I hope you never become your mother. But where is

the mother now? Inside or out? Maybe pain is a language

I must begin to doubt more. But not the angers, they are

useful in their ways. Like rage (I once thought of it as a kind

of lovely). I think there is something in it to be studied.

 

 

 

Like a carburetor, she is flooded. I wait, open choke, crank

the throttle wide open. There’s always a violent answer

to which this language applies. I push the pedal down

to the floor, try and try to engage her. Small shot of ether

down the throat. Use a screwdriver in case she backfires,

protect my hands. She doesn’t sputter, doesn’t make

a sound. I kneel and stand, kneel and stand. It must be

something electrical, crossed wires. A hot engine of sobbing

I am, the first rule, not giving in. She’s the deadest kind

of battery, wreckage in the past must have ruined, and

now it strikes me that I am, in these fumes, also wrecked.

She is a crucial car, a futile car, an old combustion of

necessary fuel, brutal love, and faulty sparks. I turn

her off and on, off and on – but the mother won’t start.

 

 

The first two parts of “The Broken Mother Sonnets” appeared in Plume https://plumepoetry.com/2018/12/5-under-35/

Contributor
Kimberly Grey

Kimberly Grey is the author of two poetry collections, Systems for the Future of Feeling, forthcoming from Persea Books in December 2020, and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize. She has received fellowships from Stanford University, The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and The University of Cincinnati, where she is completing her PhD. She is a contributing editor of On The Seawall.

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