“We bring you here to see dead things—”
A folio of the supernatural in motherhood *
As we enter autumn, the veil between the living and the dead thins, becomes gauzier; time seems to take on a different meaning. As Tzynya Pinchback says in “Menarche,” “everything now is before and after, everything now is before and after. Something wild in us all.”
The poems in MER’s September folio center the supernatural in motherhood. In “Orchard Revisited,” a poem rich with the smell of ripe apples, Diannely Antigua writes of her miscarried nephew, “my sister and her husband waited // to meet their dead son,” who leaves the earth with the smoke of a snuffed-out candle. Nancy Ring’s mother in “How Brightly,” too, “dissipates with the steam, and I’m alone in my Siberia . . .” Joanie Reese’s mother, unready to die in “Fever Dream,” sees “the collector” and her husband’s ghost until “he’s gone, and specter dissolves, leaving her death undone.”
At times, the hauntings are internal, the other world living within the “real” one. Barbara O’Dair confronts a specter of herself in “Monster,” something “too close to a horror show,” when the old and infirm previous owner tries to enter her home. “I kept her out of a house / that once was hers because her nightgown scared me, and I was the confused one.” Nida Sophasarun realizes in “Sirens” that the ghost had always been there, “beautiful and cold and haunting me / since birth.”
These mothers ask much of their ghosts. In “Invisible,” Sara Ries Dziekonski tells us,
You see my mother is here
just invisible
and I will spend the rest of my life searching
for the ways she whispers
Boo—
Lindsay Kellar-Madison asks the one who wishes her dead, “What is this vacuum beneath us?” In “The Weight of Bodies,” Erin Armstrong, whose grandmother’s ghost “stands in the street,” tells us, “I am tired of asking photographs to speak . . . Everything exists because someone came before.”
As we read the poems that became this folio, we traveled a timeless world, experienced “a ghost rippling,” as Amanda Quaid says in “Farruca.” We hope these poems usher you into this season of hauntings, of ghosts, of another world where we live among those who have passed, where “past // to present tense” co-exist in this haunting world of motherhood.
*The title of the folio is a line from Jacqueline West’s “With the Five-Year-Old at the Bell Museum.”
–Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach
Featured Poets:
Diannely Antigua
Erin Armstrong
Sara Ries Dziekonski
Lindsay Kellar-Madison
Barbara O’Dair
Tzynya Pinchback
Amanda Quaid
Joani Reese
Nancy Ring
Nida Sophasarun
Jacqueline West