IMOGENE’S NOTEBOOK
My Mother, the Girl
A poem
She brings up the time
they took her on a school field trip
to shoot rifles. She was thirteen,
she was far from being a girl,
far from being my mother.
Were you afraid? I want to ask,
But now she’s thinking of oranges,
ripping the peel, squeezing pulp into the juicer.
“We ate this twice a year, can you believe it?”
She is probably thinking of oranges,
flat on her belly in that field, holding a rifle.
The real world kills the food it eats.
It’s been eating her for years,
skipping the kindness.
“Go on, drink,” she says,
“They’re sweet, so sweet.”
One of us is hungry.
One of us has given up.
Her wounds are all I think about.
What could do such clean work?
“Will you let me look?” I ask.
But she’s no keeper of fragile things.
She barely remembers the time
they lined them up to shoot rifles.
A lot of shoes were hurting that day.
A lot of hearts dropped like shell casings.
