Ariga: Poetry: Susan Terris FIRST MEMORY
Susan Terris
FIRST MEMORY
There was a dripping spigot and another girl --
her name the same as mine.
Her Dutched hair, size, and smocked dress
mimicked me, too.
But I held no China doll with
cherub mouth whose red-nippled bottle
tasted like gum, smelled like tricycle tires;
so with stealth I stalked that Doppelganger.
Patient even then, waiting until our mothers,
voices braided into impenetrable strands,
receded, I struck.
Swift and vicious, I prized the bottle from that girl,
shattered it on the pavement.
As she keened, I -- anxious to possess
beauty -- scooped up fistfuls of new-made diamonds,
unconcerned by needles of pain
or bright leakage between my fingers.
THE HIDDEN CHILD
I was good. We were all good
Dutch children -- those of us
who survived.
Before the Nazis, Moeder brandished
other threats -- potatoes that would grow
behind unwashed ears, rats
that might nest in unkempt hair.
Then jackboots on cobblestone began
to punctuate days and nights.
In our attic room, no soccer balls
or bicycles, no tulips; and sometimes
we ate dog meat to survive.
My daughter asks about the taste.
I say I don't remember.
She probes what I mean by good:
How good is good, she wonders,
keen to quantify. Imagining me
studious, parsing out days
for later profit, she cannot fathom
the card games, flatness, waste.
She says I'm hooded, use
time as a weapon. It is. It was...
One time, when meat was scarce,
those who concealed us
rode their bicycles past Sunday soccer
to dig up tulip bulbs.
We roasted them, peeled the brown,
and ate them. As I chewed,
I thought tulip, tulip and tried to let
the flower I could not see
bloom inside.
Last year when the hidden ones met,
I did not go. I told my daughter
I was out of time.
FAT WALTER
once upon a war, a little refugee boy
Fat Walter secretes money in his chest.
When he breathes, pecuniary odors
tinge the air with wisps of green smog.
in short pants, helpless and hungry, fled Hitler
Fat Walter cannot forget. Only money
makes him full; so he swallows it
like some toothsome, exotic latke.
on a children's train without a Pfennig in his pocket
Fat Walter eats feverishly; but because
his system can't digest, he must
forever dream himself safe and thin.
WASHRAG
Something has happened.
Whereas once my speech sluiced like water
over a spillway, smooth and satisfying,
now it often gaps, lapses, presents moments
where -- as silence wrings my tongue --
no word appears. A few grains
of sand scatter through the glass;
and words riffle to the surface leaking,
overlapping, repeating, dribbling
transposed syllables, confused consonants.
Oh, please help, my mother-in-law
once pleaded. Something is happening
to me. But I, still facile then, frowned
feigning empathy as I scrawled her signature
on the nursing home forms, while she
whispered that some person
with a washrag was scrubbing her brain away.
Now, years later, I feel as if she, arching back,
is plying her washrag inside my head.
TO MY SONS
Instead of using the staircase,
Risk the tendrilled stalks of ivy
And drop into the muddy copse below.
Your great grandfathers understood mud
As they slogged from village to village
Peddling pots and ribbons and scissors.
You may collar their essence
If, shaking pearls from your ears,
You can know wet boots and windfall.
Susan Terris lives in San Francisco where she is a writer and a teacher of
writing. Her recent works include Author! Author! and Nell's Quilt (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), KILLING IN THE COMFORT ZONE (Pudding House Press), and many
journal publications including The Antioch Review, The Midwest Quarterly,
Painted Bride Quarterly,Southern California Anthology, andThe Southern Poetry
Review. On-line she has had work in The Blue Penny Quarterly, In Vivo,
Switched-on Gutenberg, and Zero City. Email Susan Terris
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