Poetry |

“My Mother’s Pocketbook”

My Mother’s Pocketbook 

 

 

On the day she died,

I found her knock-off alligator bag

zippered and snapped.

 

Within, her wallet,

a wrinkled five dollar bill,

and some change,

 

a linen hanky reeking

of Jungle Gardenia,

a rain bonnet folded neatly

 

in its plastic sleeve,

two safety pins, for an imagined

emergency. And tucked away,

 

an amber bottle of Valium

just refilled, her full name and birth date

on its label, the childproof cap

 

insecurely fastened as if

she’d been in a rush

to calm her rattled nerves.

 

I held the vial up to the light

and shook it for the silence

that followed.

Contributor
Judith Harris

Judith Harris is the author of three books of poetry, Night Garden (Tiger Bark, 2013), The Bad Secret (LSU, 2006) and Atonement (LSU, 2000), and a critical book, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing. Her next book, Poetry and Grief in Romantic and Contemporary Elegies, is forthcoming from Routledge.

 

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