My Winter Mother

My Winter Mother 2020-2021

by: J. Berry

BEFORE THE SNOW Did they ever tell you about the night the dish ran away with the spoon? The night she cast a blanket across the aether with the storm-struck feathers of migratory fowl And the cow jumped over the moon? We traversed empty freeways; burning bulbs cutting through the sticky pitch. And you spun tales about the bastard spoon.

Sometimes you told us to pack all of our things and leave. And other times you’d fork the spoon, make us all mutineers. Did you ever want him to leave first? Did you want to live a life unfettered by dirty dishes and spoons? empty sink; winter house.

THE FREEZING When times were good with the spoons and forks, I spun and spun and spun and spun. I crafted sun-to-set spindle-to-spool. Tribute blood to tips of every finger; red rivers born of my labor flowed through the backyardaround the trees;

flooding underground systems of wiry root-wrought iron peat and loamy silt castles. I tried to build a home. Was I not industrious enough? When I drop the spindle in the river will you wish me away too?

THE SNOW If I chase the spindle down the river where will it take us? Will it take us to the house you grew up in? With thick and velvetine yellow couches, cigaretted ceilings and mothed clementine curtains, exposed sundried baseboards, plant mausoleum with tiny santas? Will it take us to your best friend’s house? With the moss-bed shingles, musty tiled sunroom, and marijuana-steeped pole barn? Will we cry? Hysteric garbled dirge: drowning in the oceans of your sorrow that fill the car and crash up lap up smash up against the windows and sink back into the dirtcaked minivan carpet. To your brother’s by the lake? The crocus constructed settlement on a tilt with high ceilings and more new ghosts than old embedded in the plush blue rugs? Will you drain the life from a

THE JOURNEY When I chase the spindle down the river I go alone. And the spindle takes me wondrous placesA place where the snow melts like spun sugar in water leaving ethereal petrichor in its wake and verdant everything encapsulates both mind and body with an undying persistence. Is this the home born of my blood? pack of symbiotic Marlboro lights the whole way there? Veer off the road and curse the old gods? How will you ever establish dominion over house and hearth? Call out to old mothers and friends? Will it take us to the Famous Footwear at the mall to buy 3 new pairs of don’t-tell-yourfather shoes, or a haircut with trendy highlights, or submarine sandwiches at the expensive restaurant in Brighton that you love? Will the spindle make me separate my things in twos and put them in boxes? Will it make me manufacture conversations with teachers in different school districts? Will it give me the age old ultimatum of the spoon or the fork? Stay here or go there?

If I chase the spindle down the river will the spindle even fix anything?

Acrylamide screams waft: bread beckons and bargains for deliverance “Oh, take me out. Take me out, or I’ll burn. I’ve been thoroughly baked for a long time.” Heavy Adam’s apples grow pendulous from old trees “Shake me. Shake me. We apples are all ripe.” A stone crested hill smoked in the distance accompanied by an old rocker and a lilac bush.

WINTER MOTHER Lilac woman with spindled teeth and onion-paper skin told me not to be afraid. I didn’t have the nerve to ask for my mother’s spindle back, unearth it from her cuspidated jaw. She asked me to stay a while; worry not about dishes nor spoons, fiddled cats, nor cows, nor moons.

The lilac woman spoke soft like lambs’ ears and carried a strange kindness. She valued my industry: Calling upon me to bake the bread and pluck apples from trees. Shake the winter blanket out over the aether and send those storm-struck feathers downriver. My blood brought winter.

SPRING There came a day where my skin stopped feeling like skin. Like the lilac woman, I too, was paper thin. I felt my soul stretch out above me, look out at the coagulated oasis; look down at what must have been me. When I chased the spindle down the river did it even fix anything?

Was there still a world of rotting cutlery? Super-bovines? cats with opposable thumbs? Did the hallowed moon still hang in the sky? Was it still so condescending? Are you at your dad’s? Or your friend’s? Or your brother’s? Are you crashing the car? Are you buying new china sets to fill the empty sink?

THE RETURN I couldn’t stay there forever. And when I told my winter mother, the lilac woman with spindled teeth and onion-paper skin, That with the seasonal change, I too, must leave; She accepted my decision with grace.

From her cuspidated jaw she plucked my mother’s spindle. There was no blood. No pain. I assume once you go paper-thin things stop hurting as much. When I chase the spindle down the river I go alone