Fendrick 1 Julie Fendrick Laura Stott MENG 6940 3 December 2020 Painting a Liminal Space: A Critical Introduction to In Our Grotto In the spring of 2012, a year after my daughter was born, my husband and I sat in a multi-purpose room in Mountain View Clinic anxiously awaiting the results of our daughter’s MRI. Her then-pediatrician, in a distant, thank-God-this-isn’t-my-kid-voice, read to us directly from the report: phrases like “thinning of the corpus callosum,” “mild ventricular dilation,” “remote periventricular white matter damage,” “delay in peripheral cerebral hemispheric myelination” and his own “sometimes things just happen in utero” were delivered to us with such a matter-of-fact gut punch that a burning bruise began to swell inside me, and daily living began to feel more like a waking coma. It’s true that my daughter’s first year had not played out like the Hollywood movie I had expected. On the day of her birth, there was no rush to the hospital, with water breaking and soon-to-be mother smooshed in the backseat screaming loudly enough to rent the air for two blocks. In fact, I was already lying in a hospital bed when my water broke and I had been for three long weeks. And there was no screaming, just the holding of my breath the length of a prayer and a furrowed brow of worry and defeat. My daughter was born six and half weeks early, weighing four pounds six ounces, and when the nurse placed her on my chest, I shrunk away from touching her, fearful that I could somehow harm her. Instead, I spoke to her in an urgent whisper, “Breathe, Lily. Please breathe, Lily!” Fendrick 2 After nearly five weeks in the NICU, two years of physical and occupational therapy, orthotics, eye surgery, hope, tears, depression, internalizing blame, and bursts of defiance, we discovered, through the mapping of my daughter’s genome that, like a string of Christmas lights with one dim strand, one half of her fifteenth chromosome was missing a significant section. A “15q megabase deletion,” the geneticist called it. And it was then, at this second and true diagnosis, that I learned there was nothing to forgive. It was like being gifted rainfall after years of drought. Motherhood has transformed my life in ways that I could never have imagined, including, perhaps, the fact that I stepped out into poetry in the first place. Reading about others’ experiences brought my own disillusionment, resentment, fear, and joy out of hiding, pulled in other names and realities to orbit my understanding of parenthood, and I began to recognize the extent to which the complexities and shades of the motherhood experience are both universal and uniquely localized. In some instances, these poems breathed life into the more ubiquitous facets of motherhood, such as that erasure of self as shown in Sylvia Plath’s, “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand” (157). In other instances, I was comforted by poets speaking from the margins of motherhood from which I did not and could not have an intimate understanding: In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Margaret Burroughs justifiably worries about her children’s safety and lack of opportunity with, “ What shall I tell my children who are black / Of what it means to be a captive in this dark skin” (1-2). And, of loss, Traci Brimhall writes, “We can't remember her name, but we remember where / we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds” (1-2). I connected to these voices, empathized at times and sympathized more, but wanted and needed a literary conversation that recognized that which we did not share. Fendrick 3 In her poem “There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women,” Audre Lorde praises a joint exploration of motherhood regardless of—and because of—our differences: What do we want from each other after we have told our stories do we want to be healed do we want mossy quiet stealing over our scars do we want the powerful unfrightening sister who will make the pain go away (409). Poets from nearly all angles of parenthood have offered their voices to strengthen this conversation, detailing their unique and transformative experiences through poetry that speaks to the parent-child experience regardless of race, gender, nationality, socio-economic class, or sexual orientation To this intricately beautiful and interconnected conversation, I humbly offer “In Our Grotto,” a collection of poems written from a literarily underrepresented margin of parenthood, specifically mothers of children with special needs. With this series of poems, I strive to evoke the daily challenges faced by parents of children with special needs and to explore the sliding tensions between joy and resentment, guilt and disillusionment, to which this border of parenthood is so vulnerable. Writing From the Margins Mothering a child with significant developmental delays means mothering from the margins. This is a space where the profound demands of infancy and toddlerhood are heavy and shouldered forever; this is Alice Notley’s “obliteration” and desire to “ shriek at / any identity / Fendrick 4 this culture gives . . . claw it / to pieces” (38) stretched out to span a lifetime; and it is a space where a lack of awareness and understanding on society’s part can lead to a “compounding isolation” (“How to Help Parents”) for parents of children with special needs. Herein lay my greatest challenge: how to best relay these experiences to my audience, to provide access to the emotions of this margin space. Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda and Katie Ford’s Blood Lyrics , two poetry collections that portray traumatic experiences in motherhood, offered guidance. Shaughnessy’s collection Our Andromeda centers around the narrative of her son’s perilous birth with each poem working interdependently to create a cohesive whole. Her final poem, the title poem “Our Andromeda,” reveals at last the harrowing events of her son’s birth which resulted in a lifelong disability. This culminating piece is predominately narrative, “Cal. I can blame just about anyone for what / happened to you, but ultimately it was my job / to get you into this world safely. And I failed” (110), but it brings together the emotions of its predecessors, the more lyrical poems like “Artless”: “is my heart. A stranger / berry there never was, / tartless” (5). In an effort to create a similar dynamic, I composed a series of poems that work interdependently, some to drive forward the narrative and others that are more insistent on the emotional intensity of this transformative experience. “On Vacation” and “Musical Chairs” narrate actual events while others, such as “Guilt” and “The Diagnosis” are meant to capture the surge of emotions, resulting, hopefully, in a greater coherency of this margin space. Still others, such as “The Things People Say,” combine elements of both the lyric and the narrative: Demoted. Titled. Marooned. Othered into Fendrick 5 hibernation, we make polygonal hearts from the bubbling and curling up beneath the surface. My mother-in-law, who credits her prayer group for the miracle— who ignores all the years Lily edged her toe her foot her chubby fist one more inch— exclaims in triumph, she’s walking ! I smile politely, ……………………… I am a godless mass forever spiraling. Jane Hirshfield, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012-2017, describes the lyric as such: “As a hand offers us a way to touch, hold, and question the outer world, the lyric gives us way to touch, hold, and question our ideas, values, griefs, hopes, longings, all that is also inner.” The narrative of “The Things People Say” works to detail the stage where the lyric will take place, to drive forward the speaker’s experiences; the lyric, then, explores and Fendrick 6 expresses the speaker’s emotional transformation that occurs within this space. The turn from lyric to narrative and back again to reveal a “godless mass / forever spiraling” is meant to draw emphasis to the cause and effect nature of the speaker’s encounter with others, arguing the emotional impact of thoughtless comments and the alienation that follows. Writing from the margins also evokes the idea of borders. Gloria Anzaldúa defines a borderland as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (3). Susan Stanford Friedman, however, sees a dynamic of potential between these spaces: “Borders also specify the liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction, interconnection, and exchange” (qtd. in Papke 12). The challenges and limitations placed on parents of children with special needs most certainly creates a gap between themselves and parents of children without special needs, resulting oftentimes in feelings of alienation, resentment, and jealousy. However, if we are to jointly explore this experience that is motherhood, define what separates and connects us, it benefits us to peer into and address the parenting world of others. Brenda Shaughnessy’s collection Our Andromeda frequently addresses this space, both directly and indirectly. The speaker of “Our Andromeda,” lashes out at parents, friends, and family, unapologetically addressing the pain brought on by others: “Yes, parents, I wish that my son’s pain / meant your child would be spared / but my son is not Christ. And I am no / damn Pietà Mary” (122). At other times, Shaughnessy’s speaker makes a gentle comparison as is the case with “Blueberries for Cal”: “I wish my daughter had a sister like that / and my son a nervous system that let him walk / and munch berries” (13-15). Katie Ford, in her collection Blood Lyrics , also speaks to this liminal space. In “Children’s Hospital” the speaker addresses “all the mothers falling” and “all the fathers” in an effort to share the pain: “there’s a hidden Fendrick 7 weight to snow” (10); and in “Of a Child Early Born,” there is a direct address: “ if lightning staggers down the hall of mothers— / and it does, / so walk low, mothers, / fresh from your labors” (8). It was essential for me that “In Our Grotto” speak to this liminal space as well. In fact, adding my voice, the perspective of a parent of a child with special needs, to the conversation of motherhood was a driving force behind this collection. Like Shaughnessy, I struck out at those closest to me. The speaker of “On Vacation” is resentful of family, though never conspicuously, never directly, and is forced to confront her feelings while at the beach with her sister-in-law. While the speaker’s eyes have “been on guard duty” and is “tethered” to her eight year old, her sister-in-law is lying back relaxing with her eyes covered. The speaker then imagines what sister-in-law might be dreaming, perhaps “Mr. Darcy / or her finger tapping on the glass / of a dozen millefeuille aux fraises.” The comparison between the lives of the speaker and her sister-in-law continue through the end of the poem, but the speaker’s feelings are never resolved, hopefully demonstrating the profound sense of alienation. Rather, she has to continually remind herself, through repetition of “I won’t envy” and “I won’t resent,” that two opposing forces coexist: her love for her daughter and the resentment of living in this liminal space. According to Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, authors of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry , “repeated words assert themselves, insist on our attention” (151) and emphasize both music and meaning (158). Each time the speaker of “On Vacation” attempts to subvert her feelings of resentment— “ no flower knows the ocean , / no evergreen can swim with the fish / or know what it’s like to be hooked / and plucked gasping”—repetition forces them to resurface for both herself and for the reader, a rhythm that works to emphasize a tone of frustration. Fendrick 8 “Ambassadors of the Stolen,” takes on a different conversation. Rather than addressing the “emotional residue” of this liminal space like “The Things People Say” and “On Vacation,” I wanted to acknowledge this space as one of exchange and connection. Here, the speaker rides the lines between her own harrowing experience with her infant in the NICU and the separation of immigrant parents from their children. My greatest concern was how to be in this conversational space with immigrant families in such a way as to show compassion rather than a minimizing comparison. In an effort to bring all parties together—the speaker, the immigrant families, and even Ceres—I used the all-seeing presence of the moon: the moon still tugs and pulls, keeping her promise to light up the darkness from above, below a labyrinth of deleted family units . Querying the Landscape It was a twist of nature that brought this margin of motherhood to rest forever in my daily life, so it seemed necessary to employ images of nature, as well as concerns of environmental degradation, to engage the topic. For this, I turned to Camille Dungy and her poetry collection Trophic Cascade . Fendrick 9 Within its pages, Dungy connects nature and humanity in her conversation about motherhood. In the title poem “Trophic Cascade,” Dungy compares the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone to her own induction into motherhood: Don’t you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this life born from one hungry animal, this whole, new landscape, the course of the river changed, I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same. (16) In these lines, Dungy highlights the naturalness that is motherhood, and in making the comparison of the revitalization of an ecosystem to the newness of motherhood, she argues this metamorphosis as a positive and powerful process. The result is a poem that works equally well exploring gladness and rebirth for both mother and mother nature. Inspired by Dungy’s nature-based metaphor, I composed “Curves,” a poem in which I compare, in content and in form, my daughter’s severe scoliosis to a river in its natural state. Metaphors are one way to “give access to images that wouldn’t be there otherwise and to deepen and intensify the themes and concerns of [one’s] work” (Addonizio 96). Although my comparison doesn’t contain the ecocritical rhetoric that Dungy masterfully commands, I sought to make a comparison that would appeal to the concerns of motherhood, to raise a plea for my daughter’s twists and curves to be natural and beautiful rather than a medical condition requiring surgery: But, oh, how she loves to move like an eel, to play the canyon’s curves. They’ll tame her with a scalpel, dam up her insides, trim off her golden crown, Fendrick 10 and cement her into a stunted sapling, for she can never be a river. In an effort to express the dichotomy between the organic and inorganic, I compared the unwanted—though desperately needed—surgery to man’s impositions and harmful effects on the environment such as the damming of a river and deforestation. Throughout this collection of poems, I continued to turn to images of nature and extended nature-based metaphors. For me, nature helped carry the weight of worry and pain associated with raising a child with special needs. With “Guilt,” I compared myself and the lack of self-care associated with early motherhood to an untended garden. The speaker herself is, or rather was, nature primed to perfection, and the erasure of self so common to motherhood becomes the intrusion “overtaking the untended / hollowing out [her] bark-covered limbs.” Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux assert that “an image . . . can direct a reader toward some insight, bring a poem to an emotional pitch, embody an idea” (86-87). I sought images that I hoped would portray this transformation from the childless to the overwhelmed mother with lines such as “the soil has been zombified / by cat shit” and “beds of ants work dutifully in a perfect / mercurial pool.” My intent was not to make certain elements of nature into something ugly, but rather to evoke the metamorphosis that takes place in early motherhood. For this reason, the speaker learns to appreciate those aspects of nature that were before so undesirable: so I will myself to behold the beauty of the white-spotted spider that thrives in the undergrowth where sap oozes from phantom wounds and the moonlight goes crawling Fendrick 11 Imagining from the Liminal Space Liminality assumes an uneasy in-between space, a place of waiting and transformation; therefore, it is perhaps best expressed in poetry that traverses moments of reality and dreams. As a parent of a child with special needs, this meant exploring the possibilities and the inevitabilities—real or imagined— of our current and future lives. For this reason, I wanted to write to engage the imagination. Brenda Shaughnessy’s confessional poem “Our Andromeda” was once again a source of inspiration. Within the twenty-one-page poem, the speaker wonders what their familial world would become if events had gone differently upon her son’s birth. In Andromeda, a parallel universe where the doctors are empaths like Star Trek’s Troi, the speaker's son will “get the chance to walk / without pain” (108), “learn to read so much more easily,” and “be able to see the letters / better in [this] atmosphere” (113). With “Our Andromeda,” Shaughnessy wants to imagine an identity that doesn’t coincide with reality, an experience common to parents of children with special needs. I too wanted to compose poetry that could wish away the hard realities of this margin of motherhood. With “Musical Chairs—or, What Could Have Been,” I wrote about a lived experience, that of a parking lot party during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The events detailed in the poem are true, cooped up kids wildly playing together while my daughter organically arrives at her own “game”—true up to the final stanzas, at least: And the distant stars turned playmates come running from foot races and four-square, and we too, guardians of the sprites, join the frenzied dance. I wonder how this whole hive appears to the passersby from the road above as we shed our green ache, return to ourselves, like maple leaves Fendrick 12 restored to their crimsoned flush. In reality, no one joined my daughter’s new “game,” but the thought was so beautiful that I couldn’t ignore it, so I placed the truth in the title: “Musical Chairs—or, What Could Have Been.” My hope is that, upon a second careful reading, my audience will discover the truth and be affected by it, perhaps even see it as an invitation to this mothering-from-the-margins conversation. Like Shaughnessy’s “Our Andromeda,” I wanted to imagine the life that could have been had my daughter’s chromosomes been correctly copied, but I also wanted to celebrate the real-life experiences that we can have together and those characteristics that make her, her. In her collection Like a Beggar , I discovered Ellen Bass’s unique ability to push through life’s greatest challenges in an effort to discover and praise that which is beautiful. Her poem “Let’s” provided the perfect example: “Let’s rummage through each other’s body / like a Fourth of July blowout sale, pawing through the orgy / of tweed and twill, silk and sequins swirling up in flurries” (69). These bold similes and detailed images of joy inspired me; if I were going to imagine a different life, I wanted to do it in full, bold color. I also felt like I needed a structure to contain the spiraling wishes, and the anaphora of “Let’s” provided me a structure to follow for my own poem “Say That”: Say that we could go to the movies, one plastered with stars and emmys like La La Land or Les Mis . We could lick salt from our lips and showtunes from our fingertips like dogs lapping on a desert dry noon. Say that one day we could sip secrets and gnaw on news Fendrick 13 like a free meal at the Riverhorse on Main, sampling the delicate buzz of trout and tiramisu, chardonnay and a chilled rosé distilling the truth. The anaphora of “say that” became a vehicle for my own celebration and allowed me to propel the images through the imagined into the possible: Tomorrow will find us dancing with moon jellies. You’ll spin and clap and fall to the ground, enveloped in the watery blue. I’ll be jellyfish too and learn to move with the current, each worried layer, a dim, watery fog. A veil. A mumble. Floating away In her introduction to All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood , Jennifer Sweeney asserts, “Make no mistake about it—poems about motherhood are not monochromatic nor do they fulfill fixed attitudes, but rather open doors, find staircases, reveal the other worldly, the eroded, the multitudinous with great range and depth” (xx). This has been my experience both during this project and prior to its undertaking. I have been inspired by and healed by the poetry of second-wave feminists and the poetry that speaks to loss and trauma in motherhood as well as those that speak to its daily joys and frustrations. Thankfully, so many women poets have been willing to hazard the designator of the “motherhood poem,” labeled such as though it were some sort of one-dimensional, domestic subject adorned with sentimentality, in an effort to communicate their own transformative experiences. Without, there would be no conversation surrounding our similarities and differences, no “ powerful unfrightening sister / who will make the pain go away ,” no connections made in this all consuming space that we call motherhood. Fendrick 14 Works Cited Addonizio, Kim and Dorianne Laux. The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry . New York, W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco, Aunt Lute, 1987. Bass, Ellen. “Let’s.” Like a Beggar , Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 2014, pp. 69-70. Brimhall, Traci. “Stillborn Elegy.” Poetry Foundation , 2012, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58084/stillborn-elegy. Burroughs, Margaret. “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Reflections of an African American Mother).” Poetry Foundation ,1968, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ 146263/what-shall-i-tell-my-children-who-are-black-reflections-of-an-african-american-mother. “Chancellor Conversations: Tracing the Lyric.” YouTube , uploaded by Poets.org, 7 Mar. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82KD6tfdi80&feature=emb_title. Dungy, Camille. “Trophic Cascade.” Trophic Cascade , Middletown, Wesleyan Press, 2018, pp. 16. Ford, Katie. “Children’s Hospital.” Blood Lyrics , Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2014, pp.10. —. “Of a Child Early Born.” Blood Lyrics , Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2014, pp. 8. “How to Help Parents of Children with Special Needs Avoid Isolation.” ACCEL.org, 2020, https://www.accel.org/blog/special-needs-parents-isolation/. Lorde, Audre. “There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women.” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde , e-book, New York, W. W. Norton Company, 2000, pp. 409. Notley, Alice. “A Baby is Born Out of a White Owl’s Forehead.” Mysteries of Small Houses , Fendrick 15 e-book, New York, Penguin Books, 1998, pp. 38-39. Papke, Renate. Poems at the Edge of Differences : Mothering in New English Poetry by Women . vol. North American ed, University of Akron Press, 2012. EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=493294&site=ehost-live. Plath, Sylvia. “Morning Song.” The Collected Poems. Ed.Ted Hughes. New York, Harper and Row, 1981, pp. 156-157. Shaughnessy, Brenda. “Our Andromeda.” Our Andromeda , Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 2012, pp. 108-129. Sweeney, Jennifer K. Introduction. All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood , edited by Emily Gwinn, Spokane, Sage Hill Press, 2016, pp. xx. Fendrick 16 In Our Grotto In the NICU I. Dawn pinched you out of season, all plaster of paris, hard stone and thinly-veiled flesh— before an autumnal blessing, before the sugary softness, before fullness and sun-kissed fuzz— and left you to ripen in this your dim grotto, where wires hang like moss on cavernous walls and a timid light stirs each whispered lament. Didn’t she know your rightful place was in my bark-covered arms? In the night, I wake not to your eager whimpers but to train my muted milk. How distant are your shores. The moon tells me you stare at the ceiling at night, and I, for fear you’ll evaporate, stare, too, so the stars will whisper unkept promises to us both. I am withered, leafless, begging the moon to set the tides in motion. II. Each day I arrive twice, clutching my meager offering of yellowed mother’s milk and my lost immortality. Each day, I twice don a checkered gown Fendrick 17 and twice scrub my hands to erosion. Twice, I ring to be admitted to this, your new home. Here, you move like water, pushing and pulling yourself back into yourself: undulating, hypnotic, a billowing mass of elephant flesh, a rolling wave of tender fists. How does water know to move this way? Does it enter through the eye or through the heart? If I could learn to move like water, I would live here with you at the edge of the brake fern and tease you into your own immortality. III. I always imagined Ceres noble and dignified, but now I think I see her: The world awaiting Persephone while Ceres wrenches and shrieks, a mother maddened beyond warnings of withering crops and fruitless fields, on hands and knees tearing at seeds that rain down and down and down, her desperate dirt hands forever splitting red. Fendrick 18 Ambassadors of the Stolen Laced with tubes that grow like vines from constructs of automaticity, she stares at the ceiling. The sun, it seems, is hibernating, days upon days of gray turned white turned gray white gray. Numbers of blue and red check oxygen, check pulse, and the feeding tube taped to her tiny body pumps man-made powder mixed water. She is the fledgling of an empty nest, and she may never learn to fly. We wait and we despair and we dream, we ambassadors of the stolen. I think of families braving borders and I am bowed: fathers who’ve mastered the reassuring goodbye; mothers who summon echoes that refuse regret somewhere north of the Rio Grande, that river of May where once turbulent waters have turned fragile for lack of nourishment; Fendrick 19 the father who is rounded up and stung like cattle; the mother whose past fears loom greater than that of borders. Ceres, for loss of hers, turned wheat to dust, felled leaves that once offered shade, let all that nourished this world wither in the bitter cold. From my window, I am witness to another story: cascades of striking snow are refusing Spring her time, unraveling those tender moments before Summer dons her golden crown. Within the walls of a frigid room lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs, mothers and fathers are being interrogated, their children hundreds of miles away stifling the sobs that carry, writing their own monsters— no candy houses or lumberjacks— while beyond, the moon still tugs and pulls, keeping her promise to light up the darkness from above, below a labyrinth of deleted family units . Fendrick 20 Curves Curves designed in nature are a thing to praise and to pedestal. Take the river, for instance. She feeds upon the purest ice crystals, the ones formed just above, and flows lazily, filling in spaces that won’t protest. A river writes in cursive and sculpts in clay, in stone, in wood. Along her winding way, the river carries stories of old that play out in sediment, are sung through a babble, a roar, a swish. She rearranges the world. She’s an artist. Willow branches. Snakes. Planetary orbits. Pond ripples. Rose petals. Hillsides. Celestial bodies. Spiral galaxies. Tree roots. Shorelines. Waves. Mollusk shells. Mountaintops. Mutable. Organic. Graceful. Smooth. Erratic. Shifting. Mercurial. Sometimes volatile. Certainly unrestrained. Today’s x-ray reveals that once again her young frame has rocketed itself into ribbons, misguided train tracks surging inside that hopeful cage. But, oh, how she loves to move like an eel, to play the canyon’s curves. They’ll tame her with a scalpel, dam up her insides, trim off her golden crown, and cement her into a stunted sapling, for she can never be a river. Each day, I curve and twist and wind: two beautifully imperfect braids to beat and bounce upon her twisted back, her riverbed of bone. Her orthotics— those linear traps— open their guttural maws. Click-clack , click-clack , click-clack . Fendrick 21 Say That Say that we could go to the movies, one plastered with stars and emmys like La La Land or Les Mis . We could lick salt from our lips and showtunes from our fingertips like dogs lapping on a desert dry noon. Say that one day we could sip secrets and gnaw on news like a free meal at the Riverhorse on Main, sampling the delicate buzz of trout and tiramisu, chardonnay and a chilled rosé distilling the truth. Doctor Church says sometimes things just happen in utero . We may as well imagine that we are starlings sent by Shakespeare to murmur our presence in this new place. We could tumult in a maelstrom, shifting in unison, roaring, renewing. Our wings would be paddles, dipping and pulling through the arid blue. Our throats could swallow, could mimic, warble, creak, squeak, chirrup, twitter, and trill. This morning I reread your diagnosis so I could explain your outturned right foot, your bent back, your speechless song, but what does it matter. No one asks and I don’t tell. Say that we could go grocery shopping, could stop to compare the ingredients of Rao’s marinara sauce to Prego’s. At the checkout, I could teach you why Anne Shirley loves Tennyson and kindred spirits, and you could teach me that it is rare to spawn pink sheep in Minecraft . Say that we could shoutsing “I Feel Pretty” while tossing tissue-paper butterflies beneath the swamp cooler’s pleasing breath, delighting as they flutter and dance to our harmony, your tender fingertips reaching to catch their soft white fall. Yes, let’s say, if only for a moment, it all went that way. Did you know that you were a butterfly before you learned to walk? It was your second Halloween, and we decorated your wings in fuschias and tangerines and you emerged, your pigtail antennae bouncing along —teeter and prance, teeter and prance. But hasn’t it been a long day? Tomorrow, I’ll try harder. I’ll do better. Tomorrow, let’s walk along the Parkway Trail. Our feet can memorize the path beneath the canopies of oak and cottonwood, and I’ll show you how the river praises her mossy hair and how the breeze is careful to catch just the treetips. But you’ll discover the beauty in your own way. Tomorrow will find us dancing with moon jellies. Fendrick 22 You’ll spin and clap and fall to the ground, enveloped in watery blue. I’ll be jellyfish, too, and learn to move with the current, each worried layer, a dim, watery fog. A veil. A mumble. Floating away. Fendrick 23 The Things People Say Sometimes people say things that light heavily upon my heart, like the talons of the ferruginous hawk kneading red. God must have chosen you for this special child. He knew you would be the best mom for her. But from this message sent by space probe I hear, Oh, what a delicate oblong orbit you live . How does one inhabit an iceworld that was supposed to stop evolving but didn’t know? What is this sunless ocean inside? I’m so sorry , they say. Demoted. Titled. Marooned. Othered into hibernation, we make polygonal hearts from the bubbling and curling up beneath the surface. My mother-in-law, who credits her prayer group for the miracle— who ignores all the years Lily edged her toe her foot her chubby fist one more inch— exclaims in triumph, she’s walking ! I smile politely, swallow what feels so sour to me. What would they think Fendrick 24 if they knew what I cannot seem to say aloud— I am a godless mass forever spiraling. Fendrick 25 Guilt September is waxing again that virgin who beckons with promises of temperance entices with offerings of ripe souls I decline her hues of harvest nail my regrets to the door there to perch upon all the rest from squares of glass I’ve watched it spreading overtaking the untended hollowing out my bark-covered limbs spring’s sweet lilac blooms turned stagnantgolden carcasses reside beside last year’s now gray ghosts caged by skyscrapers of milkweed the soil has been zombified by cat shit and skeleton leaves left from last year’s fall and in it beds of ants work dutifully in a perfect mercurial pool maple limbs have invaded intertwined themselves in vines so thoroughly that from my distance boxed inside a small window I wonder which is real and which have I invented some nights I still deadhead the neighbor’s dahlias still water the moony parasols now roses are wild shades and only the hollyhocks in their brilliant Day of the Dead dresses have flourished the pink of their faces now painted with earwigs so I will myself to behold the beauty of the white-spotted spider that thrives in the undergrowth where sap oozes from phantom wounds and the moonlight goes crawling Fendrick 26 Musical Chairs—or, What Could Have Been It is said that in ancient Greece, Iasis and her sister naiads once tended a sacred spring where the ill could shed aches, wash away disease as easily as one might scour the day’s dried clay from the cracks of knuckles— the pain diluted to mere sediment and abandoned. But nymphs were playful too. The blacktop before me is filled with nymphs, or perhaps they are sprites, this carousel of color and sound. Kate and Lucy zigzag like dragonflies, standing on their pink pedals singing look at me ! while skateboards race and toddler feet prance and all as brilliant and distant as stars. From across this desert of dark pitch and sand, I sit amongst the other parents in a circle of camp chairs and we watch our progeny whoop and whistle, their arms out wide, faces turned to the blue, our little cherubs so delicately prodded, so jealously guarded, plumped and perfected into flight and we congratulate ourselves for their strength, for their cleverness, even for their red-golden hair and honey-ambered eyes. And Lily sits here too, donning her Ipad like a boombox, big as life and full of sound and Say Anything fashion. I wonder at how she processes the yellow noise of her sister and the kaleidoscope of her cousins’ parade, and I wish that their great animal gladness could nest in her missing piece of chromosome, fill it like caulk or buttercream icing, and carry her out into this lionpride of kids. But when Lily discovers something abandoned in the pocket of one chair, someone’s crumbs turned treasure, an epiphany! her mind begins to whir with her own game as she works her way beelike, all golden and fat with fuzz, from camp chair to camp chair, black canvas turned blades of fuschia cosmos, in search of more sweets. And against this edge of parking lot where lives a mishmash of rough weeds and scrub oak, a backdrop of billboards, and seasons of worn rocks and broken glass, a game of musical chairs surfaces from Lily’s cryptic cosmos where I imagine Earth has two moons circling and bulbous rings of contentment. Now she spins in her awkward orbit, clapping and lighting her bee fuzz in new chair after new chair, emerging all sound and color, singing as if to say take my hand ; see my world ; sissy , come play with me . And the distant stars turned playmates come running from foot races and four-square, and we too, guardians of the Fendrick 27 sprites, join the frenzied dance. I wonder how this whole hive appears to the passersby from the road above as we shed our green ache, return to ourselves, like maple leaves unmasking. We’ve been to the margins, washed over by Lily’s light, and we’re never coming back. Fendrick 28 In Dreams, She Speaks before the blueblack ripples are smoothed over by a god’s flattening hand hidden in my well of want and just before deciding to dissolve or to surface into consciousness she speaks in slivers and soliloquies and the tall black iron gates open their maws releasing some extinguished species and sea ice settles into a porous state and at her sound the scorched earth grows green inhaling senseless smoke until only a diadem of purple haze remains and waterfalls are conjured on mars and a child is pushed onto the blacktop of red leaves which crinkle and cry but this time she senses the bruise without anyone to carry her and maybe just maybe she says sorry too much sorry she’s more than air sorry for seeing stars in tomorrow’s puddles sorry for being just another orange daylily and the pockmarks in the moon begin to fill playdough in a child’s hallowed hands rolled round and round and round and— Fendrick 29 The Diagnosis It was always there— unborn, unfed, unwept— until it poured from the doctor’s lead jaw like a tempered cyanide, a burning star— uncontainable, undone. Coming out all chrysalis of blind fog, it festered, it swelled, it eddied against the walls of my soul. It made landfall, and its multiple vertices roared and surged like yellowjackets eating and excavating my newly-made mother's bloom just to build their papery nest. We sat apart, our silhouettes muted and motionless in the dark TV, the residue of last week’s birthday bearing witness— a mylar balloon bobbing at half-mast and week-old tiger lilies, their skins curled brown and drooping to fall. And I was without a well to draw water, without a spell to conjure courage. Now I drink from this vessel that churns with paper lanterns and deep sea, transformed like you— hollow log and laurel tree. This second birth has forced me to pin my mortality onto a map, to keep you warm inside my new house of bone, forever green and rooted in your dark earth. Fendrick 30 On Vacation My eyes have been on guard duty since we planted our umbrella on the beach, scanning the shoreline’s lapping tongue for sharp rocks and blackholes. The turquoise-tiled lake lifts its skirt to reveal smooth stone and silt as the evergreens check their blue visage in the mirror. On vacation, I’ll leave envy behind. Sister-in-law’s lying back, wide-brimmed hat sheltering her whole face. I wonder if her eyes are closed, if she might be daydreaming Mr. Darcy or her finger tapping on the glass of a dozen millefeuille aux fraises. Her daughter, toes curling in the sand, busies herself with constructing Barbie’s dream sandcastle as her son defends the westernmost goal from the other parent-free teenagers. This idle scene begs to be considered for the landscape artist’s next gallery opening, and even the sun cajoles, like a brother at a Christmas party, conspiring against my resentment. My daughter, at eight, sits on the shoreline backwards, like a rowboat tied to a distant shore, her fingers lodged in the weighty wetness, her feet slapping the sand as proudly as if she’d discovered the equator. Though I am tethered to her, never more than two feet from her, she sneaks a fistfull of sand, stirring and crushing the grit, Fendrick 31 pushing it between her already shed teeth. Placing one hand on top and one hand beneath, I pet lake sand from my daughter’s hand, rake it, softly singing, from her mouth. But I won’t be resentful, won’t spit iron arrows at the onlookers— at sister-in-law. So I remind myself no flower knows the ocean , no evergreen can swim with the fish or know what it’s like to be hooked and plucked gasping. Perhaps it is the moon, then, who understands this ashen space between disillusionment and devotion, but I am too small to be seen, and she has too little pull here. Back at the cabin, stairs are cliffs, drinking glasses left carelessly the night before are grenades. But I won’t resent the parent-flower slurping thick brown beer, feet up on the deck, won’t envy the parent-evergreen’s self-preserving long naps, long walks, long reads. Later, the sunset will usher us down Logan Canyon, and I’ll glance at the car ahead and imagine its occupants and their destination: soccer practice or the grocery store, to be sure. Such normal lives, I’ll think, turning up “Sunsets for Somebody Else” as my companion coos and claps, leaning into the curves of the canyon, her head tilted a little to the left. Fendrick 32 For My Daughter, On Learning to Breathe Again On the intake, I breathe in the most delectable of summer nights, when I was drunk with the expanse of the night sky and marched down a red carpet of road, the resonance of my own band madly stirring my blood. Sometimes I take a deep drag of that club in Paris when I felt like I was wearing the milky way and we took the metro back thrillingly late. (Did you know I was once married to Invincibility?) Sometimes I breathe in the papery wings of the monarch that flitted north last June just to feel the color of sunset burn in my lungs. And, yes, there are times when I want to join a flock of starlings, tug at my tether until the sinewy strips, like taffy, burst and I murmur through the watered-down sky, climbing and diving like oil tipped in water. But when I breathe out, I wake pressed in a cocoon of of thick honeyed grasses and the shape of strawberries, and then my roots thirst for you. Sometimes I exhale that day when, at two, you learned to walk and the west-facing windows poured yellow into your already yellow hair and you reached for me smiling, a slowly beckoning bloom. And when I fight to brush your earthy tendrils or share your crooked nest, I sigh the length of a geyser whistling steam. Sometimes I exhale rings of hypotonia, thinning corpus callosum, delay in cerebral myelination, delay, delay, delay, stunted, twisted, deformed, and then these whisps too slowly dissipating. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: For you, I will settle into the earth, bury my body in acidic blue, pinch sapphires from the hydrangea and not the winter’s sky. I’ll breathe in, I’ll breathe out and I’ll try not to worry about who will care for you when I stop. Fendrick 33 Notes “On Vacation” is shaped around Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Work.” It also takes a line from Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Our Andromeda.” “Say That” is shaped around, and includes a line from, the Ellen Bass poem, “Let’s.”