Luanne Castle
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To My Newborn Grandson I Care for While His Parents Are at Work Language floats around you, balloons you can’t even see. When I speak it’s to teach you my voice. For me to remember what I wish for you so that I can repeat it as a protective mantra. Old MacDonald had a farm. I will watch over you. You will always be loved. I say your parents have struggled, and what that means is I have struggled with how to love and help them enough to make up for their inability to love and help themselves. You prepare to cry when I place you so carefully in the bassinet, my wrinkled hand under your head leaving you last. So, instead, for hours I sit here on my great-grandmother’s rocking chair with you in my arms, your face content with my warmth and padded lap. The gentle rocking. Your dad calls you his miracle, but you have created the miracle of parents. Parents who cuddle and kiss you, who give you your first bath, sharing photos in your Apple photo album. When we are together, you and I will giggle. I will read you Whitman. Before too long, you will reach out for words and hear me singing: where is there a baby with no crying? One day I won’t be here to answer the riddle. Will you still hear my voice? ** Waking Up The bed folds around me, a clam shell closing on itself. The trigger hairs of the Venus Flytrap tickle my arms. I escape, fighting the neckline of my nightgown, aiming for that flat patch of floor. The knotholes grow like nooses around each footstep. Running to keep from sinking into the pine plank stocks I head to the kitchen and the first cup of tea. The rising steam entices me until I am Alice swimming for my life with no way to climb the slippery ceramic sides. Rounding the perimeter I can’t tell when I’m trapped in the endless loop where nothing begins or ends unless I give in. A single fly on the centerpiece takes flight, releases a dry straw which flutters into the cup and allows me to climb out. I look back at the redgold circle inside the white and notice how the steam has disappeared. Making my bed, I see how flat it is, like the floor, two in a series of angled planes in the house. Round eludes me, and I hunt for it now, no longer fearing its vitality. The cat lies, a pinwheel, inside his basket, the pulsing at its centre; the rock outside where the lizard performs his push-ups thrums; soon crockpot sizzles with chicken, basil, wine; my neighbour’s belly shifts, eight months along. The fly lands between us, watching with its large round eyes. ** This poem first appeared in Doll God (Aldrich Press/Kelsay, 2015). ** Baptism in the Morning Each one grown, three girls and a son, and this year a baby all over again. That morning, when the churchwomen’s eyes brimmed over with questions, she rolled her own at her husband. As she braced herself against the slow sharp slashes of shame, many-coloured, their varying affect, her viscera soaked up the family guilt. Did talk idle in the wind, on the unfurled branches? She tried not to wonder what they thought. Now she glanced sideways at the tipped-down face of her eldest, brown hair bobbed and curling from the temples, eyes intent on her fingers folding back shells at the seams, peas sent popping into the bowl like children into a ceramic world. While the two younger girls milked the cow and hauled the water, the two women in the kitchen prepared dinner as if they were interchangeable, slipping a milk rag into the baby’s mouth, hushing her cries, first one, then the other. Margarethe Wendel Klein 1869-1932 Budesheim, Germany Elmhurst, Illinois, United States ** This poem was first published in Kin Types (Finishing Line Press, 2017.) ** When Your Grandfather Shows You Photographs of His Mother You identify yourself in the antique image. Long slender neck, narrow torso, your face tipped to avoid the light. Your hands rest in the valley between your thighs sharp under yards of stiff calico. Your face long, well-sculpted by a lean diet and youth, nearly but not ascetic. Blue veins clutch the temples under translucent skin, a milky film that just contains you. In the next photograph your black dog Carlo poses at your side. But Carlo isn't your dog. Three degrees separate you across the time dimension. You never beat a man with his horse-whip for using it on his horse, though you wish you had that sort of courage and that sort of hands-on life, or burned all the books except the family Bible, praise her lord. And yet you hold your bodies as both shields and thresholds. Because a face never reflects the same, every photo sees something else. You're your father under the red star and your mother's grandmother in the morning sun. But not your mother who is the image of her aunt. You never did let her kiss you. You see Carlo and his mistress in another photograph, and her smile is so familiar. Now the gauzy mask of your mother's face floats across her-your features. Another light source and hour. Another shift of the hologram that is you. Cora Wilhelmina DeKorn Zuidweg 1875-1932 Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States ** This poem was first published in Kin Types (Finishing Line Press, 2017.) ** How to Create a Family Myth My grandfather built a city with his tongue. Houses and little shops, celery fields and sand lots all connected to each other without roads or sidewalks. Once or twice he showed me a map of sewer lines running like Arcadia Creek underneath the cobblestones and packed dirt. We stood outside and found tall buildings in the clouds overhead. His hands gestured how his grandfather placed the bricks and taught his men to shape upwards, each building higher than the one before. Out there on the stoop, he pointed out where his mother, the one he said I looked like, had witnessed a man beating his horse. I saw her calico skirt billow out behind her, her hands wiping across her apron stomach even as she ran. When she reached the man, she snatched the whip from his hand, his surprise at her actions slowing him, rendering him stupid. When she cracked the whip down on his back time did not go on for her as it did for the rest of the world. Not until a week later, when she went to the market, did she realize that the story ran, too. It kept running until it reached all of us, each child and grandchild and great grandchild taking just what is needed from the tale. In my case, I plucked a heart from the clouds and tucked it safely inside a brick house in the city where it keeps the city alive to this day. ** This poem was first published in Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press, 2022.) ** 14 May 1897 What Came Between a Woman and Her Duties On this Friday, in our fair city of Kalamazoo, Recreation Park refreshment proprietor, John Culver, has applied to the Circuit Court to gain custody of his two young daughters from his divorced wife. The girls currently reside in the Children’s Home. They were accompanied to court by Miss Bradley, the matron of the home. Mrs. Culver, the divorcée, and the children were represented by J. W. Adams. The father was represented by F.E. Knappen. Mrs. Culver, pale and stern-looking, wore a shirtwaist with tightly ruched collar and generous mutton sleeves. The strain of her situation shows clearly on her visage. In the past, Mrs. Culver has been aided and abetted by her female friends in the art of painting, as an article of 6 February 1895 in this very daily can attest. A large number of friends of both parties were in the courtroom and heard emotional pleadings on both sides. Judge Buck ascertained that Mrs. Culver is engaged in the pursuit of an honest living at this time and so ordered that the children remain in the mother’s care. She was given six months to bring them home from the orphanage or they will go into the care of their father and his mother. Let us hope that Mrs. Culver can stay away from the easel. ** This poem was first published in Kin Types (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and in Verse Daily. ** Luanne Castle has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her chapbook, Our Wolves (2023), was First Runner-up for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Award. Luanne’s Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, TAB, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, Bending Genres, The Ekphrastic Review, One Art, Sheila-Na-Gig, Feral Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Does it Have Pockets, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals and anthologies. Luanne lives with five cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare. |
