Brooke Martin

Interior Strandgade 30, by vilhelm Hammershoi (Denmark) 1901

Lost Cord
 
Give me my baby  I beseech you  It’s not good for you to touch him scolds the doctor  or for that matter even see him   The sheet splattered in blood blocks my view It covers my legs held in stirrups Your forceful kicks ceased yesterday I already knew       The scent of cherry tobacco drifts into the operatory In the doorway Otto puffs on his pipe   Agnes he barks Get on with it dear Lord    I am convalescing on the maternity ward where days dissolve into nights It is time for feeding every two hours The nurse hands out pink faced bundles left and right to the new mothers She walks with dispatch past my bed  averting her gaze  Home at last I step into the nursery   Empty   Your cradle   The oak rocker  Gone     Even the circus wallpaper  stripped away   Where’s the maple dresser  Each drawer neatly stacked with your embroidered baby gowns   I used a fine gauge needle and silk thread to stitch you an entire menagerie  I was most proud of my needlework on your duckie smock   Although it ended up in the bottom drawer  to hide the unsightly stain from my pricked finger    At breakfast Otto barricades himself behind newspapers On weeknights dines at his mother’s in the village On weekends flyfishes in the stream      withdraws to his workbench to perfect his lures     All day I hear the hollow sound of my footsteps pace the wooden nursery floor Or the rhythmic creaking as I sit on the rigid chair  rocking   rocking   Weeks go by   I implore Stanley our coachman to drive me to the village  People stare as I  alight from the carriage  cocooned in black   I hear a baby wail behind me in line at the mercantile exchange I turn around   There    a young mother soothing her little one who’s dressed in chalk-white linen      An unquiet sensation rushes into my breasts   There    I found it  Your delicate smock     A faded splotch of my blood mars the duckies on parade
 
umbilical cord
incinerated remains
tethered to my heart

​**

September Smoke

“Now, we know we all favour our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub? So we set an experiment…and it turns out they do recognize their kin…they even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.”  

Suzanne Simard, Forest Ecologist, University of British Columbia 

“.. human grandmothers have played a central role in the life history of Homo sapiens. ..grandmothers are a driving force behind the increased longevity of our species compared to other primates.”  

Kristin Hawkes, Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah 
​
I am told that in the mountains, the regal Douglas firs are ablaze with wildfire.  With their sturdy roots interlaced, entire tree families are being sacrificed in place of Abraham’s son. Who hasn’t seen images of wildfires consuming trees? But I learned they also combust gas stations, melt scrap metal heaped in junkyards, explode appliances, destroy power lines. The toxic substances released are carried downwind to where we live in the valley. Sepia smoke blankets our rented bungalow. Thick ash coats the tomatoes and kale in my landlady’s garden. Acrid smoke chokes my breathing; smothers hope in my lungs.

I babysit my daughter’s chubby toddler who’s in the bathtub while she’s out foraging for breathable air to feed him. Over and over, the little guy empties and refills a crinkled discarded plastic bottle. He submerges it in the soapy bathwater, riveted to the glug glug sound of bubbles. Then he pours the tepid water down his pudgy chest. With utmost concentration, he repeats the cycle. He attends to his pretend world. From my squat stool beside the tub, I glance out at the afternoon haze through the sooty window. There is no sun to warm him. There is no horizon to scan for a glimpse of his future. I turn back to him. Is the world habitable? Let it be so. I long to give my grandson time to absorb the knowledge I pour more and more into his still tender shoots. I yearn to bathe him in hardiness so that his roots take a firm hold deep in the verdant earth.  

**

Solitary

The steep part of Hawthorne Hill starts smack dab in front of my house. Two fit women in a tête-à-tête trek up it clad in leggings and sleek vests. I sit at the bay window whose double pane shuts out their voices. They don’t seem to spot me eyeing their talk. How seamlessly their scuttlebutt flows uphill in a cadence like a pair of bridled mares. Uninterrupted, they shift their gait to match the gradient while not missing a beat of animated chat. And I, for lack of a confidante, am seemingly vested in my solitary tasks whilst my unquiet heart splits apart at the seams. For oh, how I long for such a friend.

​**

Pensive Warrior  
 
Metallic taste in Clara’s mouth like she’s devoured a revolver  she’s startled to hear herself asking her grown son point blank if he owns a gun   
  
Yes   he answers a beat too fast     
 
She detects his relief in finally divulging this secret    Standing in her kitchen her left-hand aches gripping her cellphone damn arthritis her jaw locks thoughts whirl  Sure enough  she heard him right  between then and now he’s become a gun owner  Clara attempts to mask her shock getting this news   she falls back on her skill to mirror her son’s nonchalance as if this weaponry conversation is commonplace for them  She grabs for a safe question from the jumble piling up in her mind   
 
Where did you learn to shoot it  Clara conjures a firing range in a drafty industrial warehouse outside of Philadelphia In the next space she imagines Mafia guys sitting around playing poker    
  
Here in Philly I keep it under our bed It’s a handgun 
 
Back then on January 6 2021 IT’LL BE WILD!  became the rallying call to arms Look what happened In the wee hours after the Presidential Election November 6 2024 Clara awoke from a nightmare where  the front page of the New York Times declared the winner in bold  She fumbled to open her phone the NYT  app confirmed it  Terror welled up in her like the time in high school this devilishly handsome boy picked her up for a date in his father’s shiny black Lincoln Continental    driving her home he impulsively gunned it across the railroad tracks as the warning bell pierced the still night and the gate came down  scared out of her wits strapped in her seat trapped in his mania  
 
 
Clara and her son live on opposite coasts in the US 
 
Mom you remember Jamal my friend from stand-up comedy he taught me a lot about handling guns He grew up in North Philly  remember     from a rough neighbourhood  Jamal said never pull a gun out just to scare someone that’ll backfire good chance the bad guy will have a loaded gun He’ll kill you first 
 
Clara’s toddler was one of those sweet thumb suckers who  wide-eyed  watched the rough and tumbled boys go up and down up and down the plastic slide until he had completely figured out how to tackle the work      Then he joined the line climbed the ladder with one hand on the rail while the other clutched his bunched-up Bear blankey     At the top he carefully twisted his pudgy body into position as the other boys yelled hurry up    He launched but his Bear blankey got stuck under his bottom Swaddled in quilt batting he inched down the slide reached the bottom only to dash back to the line bolt up the ladder and time after time slide down with abandon blankey tossed aside 
 
When did you buy it        A while ago      
  
Wasn’t he in prison your friend Jamal 
 
She’d been out for the evening with her husband on a school night  Home now she enters her son’s bedroom to check on him It’s dank and smelly She inhales the acrid odour of her preteen boy fast asleep his lanky body twisted in his comforter      the scraps of his Bear blankey wrapped around his damp head    silence but for his breathing     She sees that he laid out his entire specialty knife collection on his desk Clara smiles  she catches the glint of the blades in the glow of the nightlight revealing the precision of his strategy to protect himself against a would-be intruder 
 
Not prison   Jail  For a year For a break in   stealing some cash   from his grandma’s sock drawer 
 
Her son lives in a row house in Philly with his Ethiopian wife two cats and an occasional boarder Their working-class neighbourhood borders pricey condos to the west   empty storefronts and panhandlers to the east   
 
Jamal told me you want to talk the bad guy down Deescalate the situation You pull out the gun as a last resort Her son let loose his infectious stand- up laugh  Really mom I gotta tell you I’ve seen Jamal in some tense situations and truth is he doesn’t back down   Clara hears a line from a John Lennon song pulsing in her head BANG BANG SHOOT SHOOT 
 
 
At bedtime Clara reads Where the Wild Things Are aloud to her toddler son   he presses close to her like he wants to crawl back inside      his breathing slows as the story moves closer closer to the well-thumbed illustrations of Max and the partying monsters cutting loose    taking leave of their senses 
 
On Election night that one who roared his terrible roar and gnashed his terrible teeth unleashed a Wild Rumpus with his Party of Rascals       She wonders if those monstrous dybbuks won’t back down until she herself has finally slid off the edge  
 
Mom the gun is not like a hammer I use for all sorts of things  The gun’s for one purpose  To kill a bad guy  I bought the kind that makes a lot of noise when I load it so a robber will hear me loading it Jamal said that’s a deterrent right there      
 
Pensive warrior 
Deep sleep Plate glass breaks 
Happiness is a warm gun 
 
** 
 
The last line of this piece is from the song title, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," by The Beatles, a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The song title was inspired by the same phrase when  John saw it in American Rifleman magazine. 

**

As a baby, Brooke Martin camped out in an oxygen tent with pneumonia. In kindergarten, she contracted mononucleosis, in grad school Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, as a young mother pharyngal conjunctival fever virus then Legionnaire’s disease a couple years later. She never got Covid. Go figure. Becoming a grandma was the impetus to write her stories. Brooke backed into an ekphrastic poetry class because flash fiction was full. Now she’s inventing ways to break walls between forms and create new ones. She spent ten years as a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art. Her chapter “Ardent Rivals: Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin” was published in Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists Vol 3 AIMED press. She divides her time between Madison, WI, Eugene, OR and traveling with her Argentine tango dance shoes.