THE WAY WE WERE: Motherhood as a Catalyst for Change
In her poem, “Learning Language,” Erin Armstrong writes, “Extinguished are the mornings where I rise / alone to my writing, my coffee, my sense of self. . .” The poems in the March MER Folio, “The Way We Were,” explore how motherhood forever changes us: our bodies, our worries, and how we navigate this world. The poems examine these changes with honesty; they are physical and feel the changes in their bones.
In many ways, we could have called this folio “That Was Then, This Is Now.” The poems exist in time. They are as much about aging as motherhood. In “Arborvitae,” Elizabeth Hutchinson describes a tree outside the window where her child fevers,
…She dances
the way I used to
drunk and unruly, swaying
wildly . . .
Rebecca Brock palps the physicality of music in “Mixed Tapes,” comparing that plastic cassette to the son’s electronic downloads,
me slow learning the songs
he will choose, songs I have already
chosen.
These are poems of touch, of the boundaries of skin. “Everyone assures you how you will feel better / after the water breaks,” Amy Lee writes in “Seahorses.” As Rachel Neve-Midbar writes in “Letter to My Children,” the poems are “Never gentle, no low groan.” The poems in this folio refuse not to feel. Sunayna Pal opens “My Infant’s Nails” with
small
but sharp
scratch
my chest . . . .
There are, of course, other boundaries that must be navigated after we become parents. How do we confront what has always existed in this country? What can harm our children? Natasha Herring instructs in “To Bake a Black Boy,”
Assume he will fly
Assume his parent chips at the glass mountain every single day
Assume that it begins to melt away
In Caridad Moro-Gronlier’s timely, “For My 21-Year-Old Son, Who Calls Me on The Day Roe V. Wade is Overturned,” the mother must exist with this contempt and love despite it,
Momma, an old word
for a younger version
of each of us,
and there is still enough
of them in us to survive
the inevitable cleave—
“One must carry it,” Laura Read writes in “Winged Victory.” One must carry the weight of a child, of the world, of the heft of memory and change. We hope you feel the honesty in these poems, which are born from
affiliations, inside________me,
now_________blank. No longer
here___________
or here_________.
—(Marjorie Maddox, “XXX-XX-XXXX”)
Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach
Featured Poets:
Erin Armstrong
Rachel Becker
Rebecca Brock
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Natasha Herring
Elizabeth Hutchinson
Amy Lee
Marjorie Maddox
Rachel Neve-Midbar
Sunayna Pal
Laura Read