This week, Audrey’s Corner promotes student poets by showcasing their work. Kailey Blount, senior English major and manager of Audrey’s Corner, shares “I Want to Know my Mother”. Julianna Rezza, a talented contributing writer, shares “The Thief”.
I Want to Know my Mother
by Kailey Blount
i want to know my mother like only her mother can
the rhythm of her bare feet hitting kitchen tile on
Sunday mornings
the top of her head lolling back on car rides home from
dance class
waking up at midnight to her
knees on my chest
cheek on my breasts
she’ll ask me
will everything be okay?
I want to know my mother like her father with a liquored heart
carrying her yellowed picture in my wallet bent on the corners like my spine
my pockmarked face staring in the bar’s bathroom mirror
smudged with drunken sweat and drowning regret
beer on my breath
i’ll stumble home to her epiphany
we’ve got the same eyes
I want to know my mother like her sister sent to be her shadow
our fingers intertwined on home’s sloping steps
i’ll steal her shoes, her socks, her face
her place in a world too small for two cut from the same wrinkled cloth
she’ll hold me tight to her chest until i find shoes that look
like hers yet fit like mine
she’ll chase the pressure my soul left behind
climbing up stairs I built crooked
to hug me one more time to tell me one last time
you’ll be alright you’ll be just fine
I want to know my mother like her best friend lost to
growing pains
sipping on stolen wine beneath the covers of her childhood
bed sheets
talking about our futures to the moon
swearing to the stars we will stay silly little fools
and when its 64 degrees in december i’ll pray all her wishes came true
because there’s a whisper on the wind saying
I’m still rooting for you too
I want to know my mother like her first love
left in basement boxed photographs
teezed hair and teasing smiles
tripping through her teens
alive on green beans and what could be
a green lanterned man whittled with age
i’ll hold her picture the way i should’ve kept her safe
so she’ll live on in dust mit
a broken piece of ecstasy
whispering incessantly
I could’ve been okay if only you had stayed
Most of all
I want to know my mother before she knew me
when all she had to be
was herself
The Thief
By Julianna Rezza
when i was 8 i stole a block of cheese.
i was on vacation and i packed the bags, i always did
and the person before must’ve left behind a bar,
the hot summer air rushing into the convenience store
had melted it warm and by all means inedible but
with a moral obligation stricter than most laws
i begged, cried to my mother to let me take it back,
to give the cheese back to the cashier. and everyone in my
family groaned because it was 6 ounces, an accident, and gross,
but the tears only stopped when my mother said:
you probably saved someone. it was bad anyway.
and we laughed and my eight-year-old brain,
with justification and simplicity, forgave herself.
but what if the cashier gave me the cheese
what if he swiped it from the shelf and didn’t tell his boss
what if he slipped it to me, telling me to take it
and i hadn’t eaten anything for a thousand days or maybe
i had it every day and had become so violently addicted that
saying no would have taken an army i didn’t have
what if the man kept offering and offering and offering
in the dead of night, begging me to comply and i did,
the ache spreading in my stomach and my heart
what if i took it not on purpose, but intentionally
an accomplice of a crime i never initiated,
a deformed and broken thing in my hands
that i threw out and kept a secret.
what if i didn’t save anyone.
how do i forgive myself then?
