Willawaw Journal Fall 2019 Issue 7

My Mother’s Coat

My mother unearthed her winter coat
from the walk-in closet—
a parka she had worn
thirty years in the Midwest
and still kept in Texas.

The billowing pouch pockets
stretched up to the ribcage,
and the detachable hood was crowned
with a crescent of brindle cellulose.

Three decades had turned
the polyester a dusty plum;
entwined threads dangled from
drawstring seams like Spanish moss.

She spread the garment
across the bed with a reverence
reserved for family heirlooms.
“You’ll need this,”she insisted,
and placed it atop a pile
of wool sweaters with
velcroed shoulder pads.

*

A December ten years ago,
my mother,
muffled in her parka,
trudged through snowdrifts
toward home.

I chattered about post-college plans,
when she cut across, searing
like the wind against my frontal bone —
I had dreams too, you know —

her voice snapping
with the splintered ice sheet
under her feet.

*

As my mother stacked strata
of winter apparel into
surplus grocery bags,
I took the coat with hesitation,
vowing to never wear it.

I remember watching her
from my bedroom window,
as she shoveled
twenty-five seasons of snow,
her head swallowed in the hood’s halo,
the flakes whipping her body
like blown ash.

Erin Schalk is a visual artist, writer, and educator who lives in the greater Los Angeles area.  In 2017, she graduated with her MFA in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Today, Schalk teaches and is in charge of an arts education program which provides tactile art courses to blind and visually impaired students.  For more information, please visit her website. 

“Going Forward”–acrylic and oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″

 

Heading West                

In your whole life you flew only once.
It was night, and the need was urgent.
Wordless the whole way, you clenched my hand
until my fingertips turned red.
Not just the funeral, you later said, but the flying
made you dig crescent moons into my palm.

It was my first flight, too,
and I turned from your closed face to the soft
curve of the semi-lit window and watched
street lights rivering under the belly and wing.
I was so young, wanting to believe
the future waited out there in the blue-violet night.
But you kept holding on, pulling me back
as if I were the mother.

Tonight, I’m in a jetliner heading west,
descending through thirty thousand feet,
four decades to the hour when you said
death was like diving in an airplane.
An orange sky bends over LA,
freeways writhe like ropes of fire.
The ocean is a thick black rim.
Sometimes I miss you past all telling.
Sometimes I can’t forgive.

 

Maria Rouphail is the author of two poetry collections, Apertures and Second Skin.  She was second place winner in the 2019 Nazim Hikmet International Poetry Competition and has previously been published in Willawaw.

coffee

grade school mornings I woke
to my mother downstairs
at the mottled gray kitchen table  alone
with her coffee   waiting
for my sisters & me to come down
pour our cereal into plastic
bowls    drown it
with milk & sugar   our father
asleep until we left

I don’t know if my mother drank
another cup before he came down
or maybe a third with him
I loved its aroma but not
its taste

the last time I sat alone
with my mother she was drinking a cup
in the kitchen of the apartment
my parents moved to the summer I left
& they sold the house
& gave away my childhood
trains comics & shoeboxes
of baseball cards

she had talked to the young parish priest
he assured her I would come back
to the Holy Mother the Church   I was silent
waiting for her to change
the subject  tell me
who died  who had married
how she & my father were moving to Florida
when my youngest sister left
for college

I didn’t visit often
avoiding arguments with my father
about religion Vietnam  Civil Rights
my father  a self-made lawyer  built his case
with classic logic  I countered with stories
songs & poems  the volume rising
till silenced by our angry shouts

my mother coming to me after whispering
your father loves you

I never went back to that mother the Church
I moved & found faith in a small piece of land
the songlines of its trees
stones plants soil its birds fluttering
back & forth between tangles of rosemary
& hanging seed feeders the deer grazing
on fallen crab apples
the squirrels burying acorns
in winter’s tired gardens

now in my 70’s I take a pen a notebook & drive
to a downtown bakery a few times
a week order a pastry
something savory sometimes sweet
& a cup of coffee brewed fresh splashed
with cream to ease my tongue give me time
to unknot the bitterness understand the lonesome
quietude of its taste

 

Adagio in Your Absence

Day after day, the piano
sits unplayed, its lustrous,
black-lacquered presence
impressive and imposing
through the French doors.
I’m tempted to enter,

to remember the sure touch
of my fingers on the keys,
the physicality of playing,
once I learned to put my body
into it, the ring of melodious
tones, the spiritual lift

it would bring, and how time
would disappear. I miss
the house we shared, the rarefied
air we lived in, the expansive
space of our lives then. As soon
as I’d finished a piece,

I wanted to play it again.
If I were to lift the top now,
it would cast a shadow,
like the ragged wing
of a dark bird portending
the end of the world,

a shadow the shape of my grief.

 

Grace Richards has worked in the TV and film industry, taught ESL at the college level, and
during the last few most dramatic years in Eugene, Oregon, has found her poetic voice. Her work has been published by SettingForth.org, Herstryblog.com, Willawaw Journal, and in the
anthology Poems on Poems and Poets (Setting Forth Press, 2016). Her first chapbook, Mid-
Century Modern and Other Poems, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in September 2019.