Alise Alousi
I Am Not Your Mother
after reading “Whose Mother is Nature Anyway?”
Annabel Kennan, Hyperallergic November 2022
I am not your mother. I can’t carry you along
the eroding beach nor across the dirtied river.
I am not the lush landscape, not bird song
you capture on your phone, you can’t come home
broken. You thought you heard a whale, a wail,
a wailing. Assumed a woman’s voice, stance
to view the mess. I am not the domestic trope
remember the long rope how you would say
many hands make light work then drop
everything sail back to shore, plate and spoon
diminished fish, dim moon, upended basket
of clothes. I am not saving you from danger
or endangering. Don’t identify me on your species
list. What’s invasive always comes back
the ghost hand haunting you from linen closet,
pulling you into the typhoon, contaminated lake,
failing dune. I am not the lost girl or last either.
Wandering, emptied. Don’t mistake my strained eyes
or read into the silent road, spring green, there’s no
hint to be found under my barren blouse, just
the house, two autonomous cars, cupboards bare,
four bathrooms, every tub too dirty to use.
I won’t set the alarm for you, remind yourself,
wake, read the note on your bathroom mirror.
The deadline is hard, like me, it won’t be moved.
Alise Alousi’s poetry collection, What to Count, will be published by Wayne State University Press this summer. Her writing has appeared most recently in Four Way Review online and is forthcoming in the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. (Persea Books) Alise works at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit and is a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow.