Two Poems

Single-Flower Balcony Ikebana

I must have been the only one unafraid
when my babushka discovered my head
stuck in the balcony's iron bars like a sunflower
blooming open through a chain link fence.

Gazing down from the 8th floor, I watched
barn swallows prepare the world for spring.
Children pendulumed at the swings where,
later, a flying leg would butterfly my lip open.

Neighbors carried shoes to and from the repair
shack, like ants conducting the constant picnic
of their lives. And finally, striding up the path
on that March 8th, my mama in her green dress,

in her hands a bouquet of daisies for my babushka.
Meanwhile up above, my babushka worked
against the countdown, tugging and pulling me
back in before mama made it up all those stairs.

She swiveled my neck between the bars until
I twisted into a giggle fit, my neck buttered up,
like a knobby knuckle slathered in soap to coax
a ring to freedom. In response, Mama rummaged

in the fridge for sour cream to solve the problem
of my ears, always inconveniently alert. All evening
there we were together, emulsifying, whipping up
the recipe to laughter in a place that wasn't a kitchen,

long past when the rain began, never once wondering
where my father was or how he would have found
a way to fix this dilemma with scissors.

 

My Mother Was a Spider

My mother's only hobby—aside from collecting
materials for new hobbies, to be of use in a future
that never came—was crochet. She loved nothing
more than to spend hours watching concerts
as her fingers worked the hook as she made commentary
on the bodies of dancers dressed in those shimmering
sequins, making art of the scrutiny of weight, asymmetries,
the gaps in women's teeth amplified by rouge, mouths
wide with song, while her hooks and needles kept rhythm.

One year, she crocheted an entire home for her home—
a second skin blanketing her apartment. Frames
for the already framed pictures on the walls. A cover
for the shaft of the floor lamp. Then a lampshade
for the lamp shade. When the ball of yarn tangled,
she paused as long as it took to undo the knot.
So that she could tie more knots around her possessions
to hold onto them all a little tighter.

A fisherman's wife, she was a fisherwoman of stuff.
Just as my father hauled his catch to shore with a net,
her knots became a search for safety and freedom
became a form of loss; stuckness, a form of constancy
so that what she loved couldn't leave her or be repossessed
by the bank. She was a spider weaving a home in the corner
life had backed her into.

Patiently, stubbornly her long fingernails tugged
at the tangled heart of a silver chain until the center
gave way, a corner of the universe loosened, and the rest
came with it. By her hands the knot became a straight line
against the collarbone—a body composed of once-linked
circles, undone. An act so satisfying than no sooner
was the untangling complete, that she placed it all in a drawer
to jostle itself back into loops. She didn't mind beginning again.