Youna Kwak

Sometimes Mother

Guess who appeared in the living

room on the night of parent-teacher

meetings wearing underwear, pantyhose,

blouse, but no skirt, crowing Let’s go!

Guess what she did with the fat

envelope of cash from Elder Brother

supposed to go toward fixing

the washing machine. Guess what she was doing

home “sick” on Wednesday afternoon in

the empty house, guess what happened, that time she

was careless, guess how little

she remembers, how the memory

scarcely troubles. What reasons for not

knowing present their sly, upturned faces? Won’t

tell, won’t remember, all lies, wasn’t

asked—guess who’s compelled

to endanger her children to satisfy some

material or psychic need, acting rashly, feeling

sorry, expressing contrition, resentment, regret or

else just punished, anyway still yoked

to the mother-script even if not

feeling sorry at all, some joyful

smear of not-sorry feelings, defying

classification, inadmissible sear

whose sullen opacity jolts, scorched

jab of pleasure each time you gingerly

poke, aching to evade the bars of the mother-

cage that no amount of badness can bend.

Mama Killjoy

God forbid the father even the barest

speck of joy. When he has busied making

meanness last, going back and back as

far as the horizon of the core rotten world

ruled by the mean daddy of her worse daddy plus

the soon-to-be-mean daddy she married,

during all those years when I was trying

to get thin, look pretty, become someone

a boy would want to pet, she was already bones

and arrows at the surface deflecting and in the depths only

death—at best!—the only definite. Death

is the good news, living’s the connivance. In her

hoary heart she loves too hot to let in any happy or love’s

invariably the wrong question. The right one

is mama squelched, given no issue. We’d love

to kill the father too, for keeping

her under thumb and foot, her labor

looped to turn the sad days bad, the bad

days sadder, this too a task of mothering, as

our love was a thick sole’s squash upon

her febrile lights, her love was a smoldering stitch

dousing out our every needy bursting into

flame, her every calm fine to the how-are-yous

a ruse as she laid patiently in wait to intercept

the imminent arrival, the pain of the world a parcel

she intended to deliver us by hand.

Ouroboros Mother

trains me to seek constant approval so I constantly

disapprove of mother and she constantly

disapproves of me so that our mutual

disapproval defangs the specter of disapproval.

To feel weak and damaged, not to feel at home

in the world, to feel out of place, unseen, unsafe

everywhere are defaults that mother considers

proof of superstrength for despite the failure to

belong, you are here. Mother always came last

as if it were her destiny to be forgotten, but even

destiny is rememberingly narrative. If story

giving value to mother’s life is anathema, not

to tell mother’s story is unethical, if story is tidy

melodrama then failure of story may be

corpse. If story of mother is unjust then failure of story

true life, if only as Mother she’s permitted to enter

story, the no-story now provides

resolute shapelessness, before settling into

the familiar likeness of phantom, before it can be

harnessed, corralled and smushed into the story

of the death of the mother, which despite all storms

will hold steady to story with you as

protagonist, a deep cake of color dissolved

in water so that something very like

Mother might emerge, divested of metaphor

or destiny, an entry

into peculiarity where you do not want to be

protagonist, you too want merely to live.

Mothering

Taking over

me, don’t know how to be cool

about it, trying to be

cool isn’t it pitiful I’m not

cool at all I smell

bad so worried all

day want so badly to do it

right instead all day just cry

and cry on the airplane cry when

she’s screaming cry

in the grocery but mothering’s

still my new best skill my only

skill it’s what I do

most now am best at no more

work no more writing only crisis and

the only center that holds having to stay

alive for the sake of she’s

overtaken me maybe will

choke to death maybe

drown if I look away one

minute now she’s four she says

very pink, pink brown, light brown, very brown now

she’s six says mommy what does rape mean now

she’s eight already hips are curving my hands

in my pockets perpetually making

fists now she’s ten getting ready I can

tell by her side look she’s sharpening

the long knives looking in

the mirror preparing to

use them meanwhile

I’m stabbing at another

skill trying to be more

than this even when can think of nothing

else but I also have a brain every day

so fogged with the nothingness of

everythingness every day veers

away can’t be cleared out every day

devastated by some ordinary sadness

of my mother’s so ordinary but

her suffering has to pierce

someone inevitably and that must be

me and my suffering has to pierce someone

someone inevitably and that must be

how we found

each other here dead-

locked into formation as

mothered and

mothering.

The Murderers’ Tale

No mamas. No murderers.

Greta Garbo

Being born means being pushed, pulled, or cut

out of a womb, meaning, mother becomes in the moment

she says Out. Becoming mother foretells the art

of injury, meaning, withholding your care

is no glancing blow, always fatal parry, never

provisional, always definitive, colonial in

forcefulness, even petty harms symptomatic, can’t

do without you, somebody’s feelings can’t

be helped, the intoxicating condition of being

mother, a life in your hands, can you love just

a little and mother, can you be loved a little less

and be mothered, the mothers of mothers

murdered at a distance each time without

story, each time mother dies again a little, watching

one by one the faraway lights extinguish, feeling

future in their presence, their mirage

unattached to obscure survival, all

this time I felt it was shame that gripped

and held me in check but it was only

love, a tiny love, just a little bit of love,

to be a little-loving father only mis-

demeanor it’s only mother whose

little bit of loving’s felonious, little

enough to kill.