Un-Imagined Mother n. • I dreamt a baby again • the morning after my empty womb evolved through the limitless contraction • Mother ? I can’t. Mother I can’t. • just your painful, irreverant abdomen, halfling eye half cortex • accustomed to the gut of a wolf • grieflonging has grayed me • Mother of the pressure to keep keeps peering into diffferent destinies • Quantum Mother, this is the dream I dream of my race to her first • held the scrim of her pup-tongued tie aside and she fell into my outstretched arms in love • after school mothering with no mouth • I m/oth/ered off the grid • mounted the mantle myself • my wit as delicate as her, sea how I’m seated by the hour of our departure • my dad’s blue truck • O, see, I’m a mother out of time• I wake up imagined womanist sapphic [M]other a Trans(re)gression regretting the threshold of me M[other] 23andme says is Senegalese-Russian see me-a culpa O, I can’t mother • Mother I cant • Mother I’m mourning • Mother my hormonal exit wound • I a child • O, it wouldn’t be right • my jilting palms, these instructionless dukes • O, my motionless psalms at sea, I seethe as I see the lost boys on the stark blue ship behind the glass • I see, a Haitian girl called ship • plastered fresco seas featured above our heads while other headlines linger • the seawave splashes an unfilled museum • I-hold the hammer, tap the glass • my mojo hand opens a new dictionary.
She whom they call mother, I seek
fractured cento for two generations
of adoptees, searching
i’ve forgotten how nothing
moves. how one day we woke
and our m/other was a nurse,
a signature
shadowed over your/my face and i
compared my hands to what i imagined
thought might look like, small as a baby’s
fist and masked as a choice.
We were connected in the most primal
Sense … and what happened in the ellipses?
o sensed a knife in y/our past.
and heard it sing, briefly, inside her.
it is better to avenge dear
ones than to indulge in this
morning. wisdom, living
in this world means always
waiting for an end.
i suspect we will go on
like this for the rest of our lives,
in a sea of tranquility, a little
bit of both: lost, smoking in her
house, twenty miles past For
giveness, and here, again, the blotted-out
region of your face.
wisdom, do not grieve.
i guarantee you: she will not get
away, spiraled in the crashing
waves, facing the worst in the gap
of danger, playing to this guilt, to
the echo of every footstep, illuminated
room illuminated without the bond
of blood at night, in my echoless coffin.
here again: my mother survived clean
like a promise. believed every white man
possessing her nose means she can return
to that place.
hands … they roped off
you
your footprint
& mistook
for brothers,
everyone cheering.
Hands … if I falls
and suffers death
while serving
your cause,
afterward,
would they act like a mother to me.
LM Brimmer is a poet living on Dakota and Ojibwe land in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2019, they co-edited the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MNHS Press). Their essays and poetry have appeared in various publications, including Gasher Journal, The Public Art Review, Adoption Studies and Culture, Voicemail Poems, Pleiades Literature in Context, and is forthcoming from Sonora Review.
Image: commons.wikimedia.org
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