September 14, 2023

Julia Clare Tillinghast

BELLS

I dreamed my son was joining the army
We were driving him there in a flood
My mother-in-law and her daughters
Were in the car with us crying

I take a yellow packet of fake sugar
That says it’s made from real sugar
From the cupboard and think about gratitude
How sad I am when I wake up

And I have run out of fake sugar
How now when it’s here
I just take
And I don’t really give a fuck

There is a bad side to this kind of exercise in gratitude
Where you hear a story where you know it’s a fact
That someone brought a machine gun into a school
And shot a group of kindergarteners

And you put down your work
And you get in your car
And you drive to a school
To hold your six-year-old son
And feel how alive he is

There is truth in that gesture
There is gratitude
But it is not a good thing to every day
Think about children dying

My teacher says there is a romance
Between aspects of our body
A couple who are deeply in love
But never see each other
She goes into the apartment
And can smell
That stuff he puts in his hair after he washes it
A water glass with his kiss-place on it

A kiss so quiet now
As to be invisible

She touches everything
Plays his record
Takes a nap where his body was then leaves

The second her silhouette has vanished
The man comes home
He can feel that she’s been there

This is the human self
Desire, ambition, caution, boredom,
A bell always swinging from east
To west, the sound of the heart

How hard it is to live inside the big picture
Hard maybe impossible

We have answers but somehow not enough space in the brain
To hold them all at once

All at once which is how we really are
Alive and dead

So children’s hearts are immortal
Because we need them to be

Every moment they beat
To keep the children running

Because they are children,
And are dying
Because we cannot let them die, and we do

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Julia Clare Tillinghast: “Becoming a single parent is, for some, freely chosen, and undoubtedly for others, wholly determined by circumstance. However, for me and I believe for many, many single parents, it is a strange combination of choice and no choice. That is, we choose to bear a child or to separate from a partner because we must—because of a deeper demand or calling—for our physical or emotional health, because of a just-knowing deep down what is right for ourselves or our children. I believe this is similar to the choice/no choice that calls a person to be a poet or an artist of any kind. Parenthood, especially single parenthood, often forces a crisis of selfhood. Most of the things that facilitate a well-developed sense of self become scarce, very suddenly and for a long time. Poetry, on the other hand, which thank God can be written quickly, while children are sleeping (as was my poem, ‘Bells’), is one of life’s great teachers of self. Because it mandates super-heroic honesty, it can open great caverns of space—of deep truth, of moral and emotional complexity, and of undomesticated freedom—in very short periods of time. I cannot imagine being a sane parent without it.” (web)

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July 11, 2023

Diane Seuss

GLOSA

“How miserable I am!” he muttered, “my God, how miserable!” And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life, and the feeling of irrevocable loss.
—Anton Chekhov, “Typhus”

He took to reading Chekhov late at night
and studied up on Fox Talbot and calotypes.
Watched the History Channel, anything
on Lincoln or the Civil War, Caligula,
who cut off tongues and fucked his sister.
After Chekhov, he’d head downstairs, putter
with a model plane or pull the lint out
of the dryer screen. Sometimes lie fetal
on the couch, make toast, unbuttered.
How miserable I am, he muttered.

Why Chekhov and not Kafka or Conrad?
Why Talbot and not Daguerre? Lincoln
and not Adams or FDR, John Wilkes Booth
and not Leon Czolgosz or Charles Guiteau?
Why model planes and not carved decoys
in the attic? All the while, he was affable
and focused, building a wooden box camera
and writing an early history of photography.
Grief, like photographs, inerasable.
My God, how miserable.

I’m thinking back on childhood. He sucked
his fingers, not his thumb. He seemed happy
but had trouble sleeping, afraid of the dark.
Aren’t all children afraid of the dark? Only
later came the other things, the unspeakable.
It reminds me of that deer we hit, the knife
my then-husband took to its throat, as men
do, letting one brand of suffering cancel out
another. That deer was a door to years of grief.
And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life.

Chekhov’s stories are essentially plotless.
Mirsky wrote they are a “biography of a mood,”
and Chekhov himself hoped to write
with the objectivity of a chemist. Bored,
he traveled five thousand miles, three thousand
in a rickety carriage drawn by horse,
to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. Chekhov,
in ill-health, suffering, trotting his way through
wilderness toward imprisoned sufferers, all to cross
paths with the feeling of irrevocable loss.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Diane Seuss: “My ex-husband walked out on us during a blizzard in 1999, dragging his clothes in two garbage bags down the sidewalk and away. From then on, my son was the child of a single mother. He was also a photographer, a reader of Russian fiction, a heroin addict, and now an addict in recovery. I write about him rarely, and always with trepidation, lest I sentimentalize or simplify what has been, for both of us, an undiminishable journey.” (web)

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May 7, 2014

Barbara Louise Ungar

DISTRACTED NOTES ON BEING
A SINGLE GERIATRIC-MOTHER POET

An Essay

When I gave birth at 45, I discovered that 35 and above is deemed “Advanced Maternal Age,” so I coined a term for my slim but growing demographic: Geriatric Motherhood. And my marriage was on the skids.

I found that pregnancy, like impending death, which it resembles, concentrates the mind wonderfully. At least, internally. According to my OB, I was the most ecstatic pregnant woman in the world, and I have poems to prove it. I was on sabbatical, so out came (after the kid) my second book of poems, The Origin of the Milky Way, my baby book. I trained myself, while nursing, to write poems in my head; once my baby went down for a nap, I ran to the computer to get the poems down. The poems in this collection are mostly short, telegraphic, and baby-centric. Obsessed as I was, I learned to write a collection focused on one subject: motherhood. I had become a vessel, and the poems, like my son, came through me. When I gave birth, I felt helpless in the grip of a ferocious life force: a model for the ancient idea of possession by the muse.

When my son was still an infant, I could set him down and he’d stay put while I scribbled, but once he began to walk, at ten months (early), it was all over. I had no help, and it was all I could do to survive.

I was lucky enough to be on sabbatical while pregnant and on maternity leave for my son’s first year. Then I went back to work.

“How is it?” a friend asked.

“Impossible.”

And so it remains, nine years later. Single motherhood is impossible. Single working motherhood. Single, working, writing motherhood. Then there’s poe-biz: a fourth impossible.

As my marriage crumbled, I found my next subject, which led to Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life: divorce (and, of course, single motherhood). These poems were exorcism and catharsis. Life for me had been so bad in the marriage that it was far easier to be alone.

When visitation began, I had one and then two days a week without my son to try to concentrate on writing. To paraphrase Anne Lamott, “I used to think I couldn’t write with dirty dishes in the sink. Then I had a child. Now I could write with a corpse in the sink.” This quote is probably from Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, the best book about single motherhood I know, a book I loved even before I joined the ranks of motherhood, and singletude, but I don’t have time to look it up because I should be grading papers, and I only have a few hours before my son comes home from school. So, the choices are always writing, poe-biz, or life-plumbing (my catch-all phrase for dishes laundry cleaning mail email bills car and body maintenance recycling garbage yard work plunging toilet fixing furnace shopping cooking dishes laundry cleaning … ). Writing wins, almost every time.

But my son comes first. Always. Reflexively. I learned this shortly after giving birth: Walking down an icy sidewalk with my babe in his padded plastic basket (one of those snap-in car-carrier doodads), I slipped. As I went down, instead of my hands going out in front of me to break my fall as they always had, my entire body curled around my son in his NASA-grade carrier. I hit the ground on my side and back, my arms holding him high up off the pavement. I was stunned by the realization that there had been no choice: My very reflexes had been rewired. I’d protected him, rather than my own body, without a thought. I realized in that instant that I would throw myself in front of a car, bullet, madman, shark, raptor, zombie, to save him, and there wouldn’t even be a choice. Natural selection: Moms’ brains are rewired.

I read a study, “Joys of Motherhood Include a Rewired Brain” (probably in the Science Times, where I love to fish for poem ideas): Virgin rats took nearly five minutes to snag a cricket, while lactating mother rats nabbed the food in just 70 seconds.

How is writing a poem like snagging a cricket? You learn to write like a mother rat: Faster. Leaner. Meaner. Shorter. Fewer drafts. More focused on what really counts: more desperate. Fearless. Loving.

If I am lucky and get a poem, sometimes I’ll have a little time left over to send a few things out. More often, I’ll obsessively revise the poem. On unlucky days when I give up in despair, instead of sending poems out, more likely I’ll get caught up in

that tiny insane voluptuousness,
getting this done, finally finishing that.

—Theodor Storm, trans. Robert Bly, “At the Desk”

A tree fell in my yard. I need to help my son with his homework and schlep him to Hebrew school grocery shop return cellos exercise relax. Instead, I’m writing this.

Mornings are hardest. Getting us up, dressed, breakfasted, washed, combed, lunched, and ready for school (which usually involves my packing five, count ’em, five bags of stuff to get through our days), and out the door on time for work often involves a bit of roaring. Or whimpering. Once he’s gone, I’m madly scrambling, mopping up the milk I’ve spilled in my rush.

“It’s too hard.” But then I woman up. Help. It would be nice to have help.

A friend doing a performance piece once asked for someone to come up on stage to help her. I volunteered. I was asked to cry. I have no acting experience but, having read about The Method, simply repeated what I had been doing earlier, hunched on the toilet, sobbing and keening, “I can’t take it anymore, please, help, somebody please help me!” I was a great success. People thought I was making it up.

I do not mean to complain. We do not live under a tarp in a refugee camp. I did not have to walk across Cambodia pregnant, as one of my students did. Kvetch a little, yes. An Irish friend, a young, married professor of English, wrote me in rage after she had her son: She told me that working mothers are trapped—we have no time or energy to write about it, let alone organize to do anything about it—so no light escapes our black hole. Tillie Olsen’s classic Silences describes profoundly the ways that love can silence women, mothers in particular. I’ve recently discovered Sandra Tsing Loh’s “The Bitch Is Back” and Mother on Fire; they’re hysterical, but Sandra is fifteen years younger than I am, and she has a really nice husband who helps her. (Old, bad feminist joke: Men are good for two things: One is taking out the garbage, and I forget what the other one is.)

There are good reasons for menopause, too: You wouldn’t want to do what I do if you were one second older than I am. (I was definitely on my last egg.) I think about women having babies into their fifties or sixties, and I know they’re mad. But even younger women with good husbands, like my friend and Sandra Tsing Loh, are overwhelmed, and most of us just don’t have the wherewithal to tell anyone about it. So, thanks for asking, Rattle.

It’s a little easier now that my son is older: The TV, computer, Xbox, and reading give me a little breathing space. He can dress, feed, wash, and go to the bathroom himself. I don’t have to watch him every second. Often we sit side by side on the couch; I grade while he reads, draws, watches movies. I’ve seen (with half my brain) every Disney flick more times than is advisable, and they’ve infiltrated my poems (as in “Crueler than Disney” and “The Middle-Aged Mermaid”). Sometimes fairy tales (“The Miller’s Daughter”), cartoons (“Looney Tunes”), or funny things my kid says trigger poems as well (“Spell” and “Champagne and Pull-ups”).

Who knows what teenagerdom will bring. What poems of mayhem. Then, in eight short years, my son will be off to college, and I’ll have the house to myself. His bedroom will be my study. (I’m working now, as usual, at the dining room table with the computer in a corner and piles of papers everywhere. I never entertain.) I’ll be able to travel again, if I’m still alive and mobile. I’ll be able to give readings whenever I want, if anybody wants to hear me. Maybe I’ll finally get better at sending my work out. I’ll have all the time and quiet in the world. And, God, I will miss him.

Like a lump of clay on a potter’s wheel, I am centered by my love for my son, and every shape I make rises out of this.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Barbara Louise Ungar has published three books of poetry: Thrift, before motherhood; The Origin of the Milky Way, about motherhood; and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, about becoming a single mother. She is a professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, where she teaches literature and writing.
(www.pw.org/content/barbara_louise_ungar)

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May 6, 2014

Barbara Louise Ungar

DEAD LETTERS

I get letters for the dead. They blow
out of the mailbox and into the snow.

I find them encrusted in drifts
or rippled and faded in spring,

addressed to an old man
I loved. Phillip,

lover of horses, I’m sorry
she ploughed your garden under.

I would have tended it.
Every envelope with your name

I rip open (forbidden
and uncanny) I hope

bears the message
you are somewhere—

I would forward them.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Barbara Louise Ungar: “I have published three books of poetry about motherhood and about becoming a single mother.” (webpage)

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May 5, 2014

Jeanie Tomasko

AFTER HE LEFT

When the children were small and sleeping,
the night warm and raining,

I would go out to a place under the broken
eaves. Naked, yes. And standing under,

wash my hair with rain and the dark of night.
I could hear cars on the other side

of the duplex. I could smell the sheets
upstairs. I still couldn’t touch anything

labeled future. Lonely in the rain,
the spirit is beautiful. It can marry

the heart for no one to see. Like I said,
I washed my hair under the broken rain,

and stood there in the night, glistening.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

[download audio]

Jeanie Tomasko: “I write poetry so that I can meet with my poetry group, ‘Garlic,’ drink coffee, and talk about everything but our poems for almost two hours until someone says, ‘Did anyone bring anything?’ I guess because poetry is life. I was a single parent for a few years after finally leaving what should have been left much earlier. This poem is about the healing. I still thank God for that broken eavestrough and my sweet kids and my husband who gently healed us all.”

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April 30, 2014

Betsy Fogelman Tighe

GIRL’S CHILDHOOD

You go to school and learn
there are places you can’t
take your mother.
You’re surprised, but complacent.
You grow able to play nearby
without interrupting,
though you don’t yet answer
questions put right to you
or know how to ask for help
when it is needed.

When your parents rumble
you know to hide in your room
scripting painfree lives for a host of happy
animals. A friend who won’t play
your way is banished forever.
What you don’t know yet,
alive in your absorbing minute,
is the distinction between sometimes
and never, or that who’s wrong shifts,
as does that bright flag waving in the wind.

School floods and first grade is delayed a week
while your third grade brother gets to go.
You’re cranky and aimless
till one afternoon you run away,
crying at the gate that you’re the stupidest one
in your crazy family.
You return, lured by cookies,
but still carrying the stupid belief.

Drawing, your mouth pulls into an O
your focus the center of a cyclone.
Fighting with your brother, you can’t quit first.
When your father yells, you bellow back.
“I hate you! Go away!” When he strikes
you cry together though he doesn’t know
his remorse cannot erase the marks.
What you haven’t learned is how
to defend against what turns you
from that center. Nothing is

healing yet, the static is dense.
What you know is the beloved mother
fails you, though you can’t quite admit
it yet, asking her to hold your art,
stroking her cheek in the evening.
In time you will hate her.
When forgiveness comes, you will be relieved,
but still, unforgetting.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Betsy Fogelman Tighe: “I really like to cry. I can justify it by saying I am having a soulful experience called catharsis that connects me to the world of others, of art. Whatever. Poetry does it best for me. Oh, those luminous moments poetry stirs up where memory swims into your consciousness to create a present that whacks you hard. I like to print out poems and tape them to the counter in the high school library where I am trying to serve kids. Once in a while, I read one I’ve written to one of my own teenagers, whom I’ve been raising on my own for about eight years, and I can go on writing when he or she says, ‘That’s pretty good, Mom.’”

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April 29, 2014

Susan Terris

ROUGH TIES: ALL MOTHERS ARE SINGLE

This isn’t epidurals, breastfeeding, or 2 a.m.
white nights. This is about the long arc of letting go—

single, partnered, or not—of what another generation
called apron strings. Personally, I’ve never

worn an apron. Still to protect a child, even one of
thirty or forty, a mother often wishes for

a sweaty palm tugging at rough ties or a hand
tucked into her blossom-splashed pocket.

Blossoming is the first time the child walks into the ocean
in her flowered tank suit and doesn’t glance back.

Look, is there any father in this picture calling, Be careful.
Keep watching the incoming waves.
And when

she turns away at Baker Beach, and the undertow
sucks her down, who darts to grab

her churning body in the surf. Fun, she said,
as she coughed up seawater. Today, in the cove of

an unpredictable ocean, I search for this girl-woman
who has gone deep. She is out there, with

no strings, and I—though married—am single.

from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Susan Terris: “In some way, all mothers, as ‘Rough Ties’ says, are single. The mother often is the caretaker, worrier, and the go-to parent. Living with a husband with dementia, however, creates a new definition of what it means to be a single mother—my oldest child is 77. When I am writing, the question I ask myself most often is ‘Who cares?’ If my answer is ‘No one,’ that poem gets zapped. If the answer is ‘Many,’ I am willing to share it.” (www.susanterris.com)

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