get your little narrow behind up that hill, or — I am my mother’s very own black girl magic
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The fawn is alone on the hillside. I know this place.
I keep scanning the range for dark eyes, what a mouth could do, coming toward me at 65 miles per hour. The awkward curve of the body gives way to endless cold. The little rattling glass of it. A dress of air into which sound disappears. * I can mother the fawn on the side of I-77 at 1:33 p.m. in October, when the light on the leaves goes green, gold, red, where the world is a receptive field, fall is a young language — and the fawn is found as the hill dips down like the bare shoulder of the pre-pubescent. * I have a mother’s range of the absolute, but I am childless. The way I hold her in my heart is the way my mother has been held. I feel in my body a turning wind like the torque of an engine as if to pull the fawn into the centrifuge of my hunger. * The body of the fawn is a negation. From desperation, the imperative. The sound from my throat was a sound to end it. In the car, my left hand gripped the wheel. You must move. You must git. I would not suffer less. From my open mouth, my hand, in its loose claw — the surprise of the lost body. My mother, my antecedent. I am the daughter who mothers all species. * Nothing worse than a bad mother. Let a mother be the opposite of doubt. In this fantasy — this fawn, the fall light through low branches — I recognize my tendency to want to take everything back. To be the girl I was before I became the mother-figure: I was just that mouth tearing its awful grasses. * Let Big Mamma tell me about the fall light before I was in it. This story, in her throat is a threat: gathering proof of what my mothering-will won’t beat back. Big Mamma always sing me the death refrain. Trouble with the song is the mark of trouble with the body. On another day, on another roadway, I saw the grey white sails of grief blow by like the skirts of my mother after which I hurried home to see my mother’s face alive. |
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April Freely’s poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She received fellowships and awards from Cave Canem, the Ohio Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She was the Executive Director of Fire Island Artist Residency.