She caught you just as you emerged from her operculum, elevating abdomen, arranging legs. Gently she placed you on her back, watched over your fragile body with twelve sets of eyes, held her breath in book lungs as you molted and hardened. On days you’d climb down, explore until hungering brought you back to her, she’d lose sight of herself, regret nights she craved her life of solitude. You’d return until the day you didn’t. Rooted in the words to cut is your name. Did your mother’s mad loving, her venom, make you stronger than you would have been otherwise? Boy, I’ve told you how we begin is not always how we end.
In this fairytale cottage tucked into an electric green mountain, circled by snakes and every kind of biting thing, she waits for him. The floors swept clean, cupboards stocked with all that he loves, she clears spaces for him to work, to heal. Cooking now, her mind’s knowing hands finger whole chickens, rub pimpled flesh clean in warm running water, handle wings like the folded arms of babes— the slippery, delicate chest recalling nighttime baths. She chops crone-knuckled ginger, onions, a fistful of flat-leafed parsley and drops them into steaming cauldrons slick with dumplings. Slitting fat eye roasts, she stabs them with garlic, baptizes with chenin blanc. Squash she juliennes into lovely legs. A sparkling brut sweats in a bucket as she remakes the bed, folds hospital corners, plumps the pillows, imagines hands, manly and once proud, cup her breasts, caress her waist then beckon her to straddle him, to rock her hips gently then not gently. Her fingers count out days ahead. Are there enough to bring him back to what he was? In this sort of fairytale there are no demons, no cannibal witches to aid. There is only this familiar scene: a good woman setting right what is broken.
Leona Sevick is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her recent work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Blackbird. Her work also appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Sevick was named a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She serves as poetry reader for Los Angeles Review and advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center. She is professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature.
Neil Rick is a gardener and photographer in Tennessee. He grows flowers and then photographs them, overlaying the photos but doing no post-production altering. His images have won multiple prizes at American Rose Society Meetings in Tennessee and Kentucky, including Best Novice at a national ARS meeting in 2019 and “King of Photography” at a 2022 show in Bowling Green, KY.
