Jill Crammond
When I Sell My Wedding Ring at the Pawn Shop
—After Morgan Parker
I grow wings with the following conditions.
Divorced is defined as not married, my children renamed fledglings.
Single mother is understood to be metaphor for on the market.
The market is a grocery store, is a shop with meat, is a niche boutique where I sell discounted me to the shopper with a hand-drawn coupon.
Does this make me sound like a domestic long-hair looking for her forever home?
My home has always been a shelter.
I have always been feral, been stray on a stranger’s porch, cat on the missing poster
you think you might’ve seen yesterday while on a walk with your happy family.
My happy family thrives with no head.
In the suburbs where I wander, a head is a leader. Is a father, a bread-winner, the
hand that twists the wire, keeps the whole loaf fresh.
I left the suburbs for the outskirts. There’s less chance of being rescued in the
outskirts. People here can’t lift their heads from the work of saving themselves.
Does this make me sound like domestic obtuse?
Less survivor than happy mother slow to recognize she doesn’t need a husband.
The happy mother is a restaurant, a kitchen with blue Dollar Store dishes, twinkle
lights wrapping the windows, a harbor to rest your head on a shoulder or a table
and still feel held.
This makes me sound like the perfect storm. Or the perfect mother.
My only pair of matching socks has a hole in the left toe.
I love my children with a pan of under cooked brownies, a bowl of crunchy rice, a
back rub with lavender oil whose calm stings their skin.
Tomorrow I will rename my home Your Shelter. Welcome.
Jill Crammond’s first book, Handbook for Unwell Mothers (Finishing Line Press) was released in 2023. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and appear in journals and anthologies such as Jet Fuel Review, SWWIM, Slipstream, Limp Wrist, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing), and Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. She lives in upstate NY, teaching art and preschool at a nature-based school.