Anne Moore Odell lives, teaches, and walks around Southern Vermont, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Western Abenaki. Some of the places she’s had poetry are the Massachusetts Review, Red Tree Review and Bicoastal Review.
A middle-aged Medusa lies awake
unable to sleep, to separate, scans
her tablet but can’t ignore the hiss,
looks for earlier reflections of herself,
finds herself sometimes, ah yes,
reads recipes and repins, arty black
and white posted, the screen dim,
gets up at dawn to find new shelves,
new ledges on her body, places to rest
objects. Great, but all that shelf space
doesn’t help her sleep, worried
about a never-to-be empty nest.
There are so many no-nos now
like bread and dairy and going out
without sunglasses. Already planning
A middle of the day rest, collapsed chair
On the porch, eyes disengaged,
Okay to let-up, the heroes have stopped
Flying in on borrowed horses, stopped
Caring really and that’s okay too.
So what a surprise when the sun
gets closer and closer, burning up
and she thinks so quick, my face!
but it is just a heavy-eyed mirror
to magnify her crow lines and hairy chin.
She has never been ashamed
of her children, how she birthed
them from her brain, pushed them
from her cranium until her skull
was a sieve, Athenas with their feet
still in. Maybe she kept her daughters
too close, too firmly attached
and now they are always needing
something, want to leave home
and go to college but won’t start
the CommonApp. Someone always
needs a drive somewhere
like softball practice or a volunteer
gig playing recorder at the nursing home.
They bite her neck, her breasts,
shed on her shoulders and the couch.
The girls all want money to buy
make-up off the internet, trips to Europe.
They dance and jump like popcorn,
sing 30 different songs at once,
fight about everything, act bored,
and once they even knocked her down,
face first on the ground and together
inch-by-inch pulled her off the porch.
It’s true she has tried to pull them off,
even once used a razor on her head
tried to abort the thought of them,
half-formed, tailless legless sisters.
Pulled and failed, even with her pride in
their second-only-to-her beauty,
the pride in the questions they asked
when they were younger, still satisfied
with milk, with the feel of the sun,
with her raking fingers up and down
their movable spines. Bright cartoons
made them smile and when a random
visitor was stone, they would laugh
and hiss with her. Now is it all unlimited
data plans and nothing is good enough.
The mirror surely bends me wrong,
she thinks so quickly, her life flashing
in front of her, her daughters cheering,
either for her to fight, or, equally possible,
for her to die. And it doesn’t matter
she had been doing it right, cooking kale,
lifting heavy weights, reading books
reviewed in the Sunday Times.
No matter she has avoided the open
ocean. Not pearls, she thinks triumphantly,
my daughters will be beyond decoration,
and sighing, she stops, heavy eyed and mouth wide.
Poetry in this post: © Anne Moore Odell
Published with the permission of Anne Moore Odell