Kathryn D. Temple

Why don’t you write about your mother?

So here she is, huge but oddly empty
like a moon hanging low in the sky, sometimes
on a summer evening, she looms so large she seems
to touch the earth, but I know that’s an illusion

because she’s the size of the wooden spoon
slamming on the counter while I stare up
startled, frozen like a baby rabbit or a deer,
not in the headlights, but in her angry gaze.

Look me in the eye, she grips my face
with pincer fingers, draws me into her orbit,
but a moon has no eyes, only scattered craters,
dark holes with no exit, and I cannot look.

Here again, she is seductive, hello! she sings,
who could she be talking to, phone cord stretched
across the kitchen, a well-groomed hand flutters,
that throaty laugh is not for me, quiet, be quiet.

The red dress, the high heels, the curled hair,
the cost of being female, the smell of booze, of blood,
it’s new, don’t cut it off me, she tells the paramedics,
Saturday night, hospital in the suburbs. Imagine her

a few years later, too drunk to walk,
my new boyfriend says he understands,
but leaves within the week, another Jack,
she tells the waiter, soda on the side.

Later, she rarely leaves her chair,
her eyes blank as holes in space,
she has no language, knows no one,
nor where or who she is, we wait

for death, and in the end, I sit by her bed
for three weeks while hospice lets her starve,
she doesn’t feel it, they laugh, no one home.
Do you believe me when I say I never knew her?

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Kathryn D. Temple teaches at Georgetown University and lives on the Chesapeake in a small town south of Annapolis. The author of two academic books and a number of academic essays, she has published in The Inflectionist Review (nominated for “Best of the Net”), Poetry Superhighway, and Petigru Review, among others. When she’s not working, she tries to keep the ducks off the dock. You can find her at medium.com/@templek and kathryntemple.academia.edu.