Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
young mother in her kitchen shines bright as milk
as linoleum, calcium, and pine
all godliness, all tenderness, her child
scrubbed and tidied for the school bus
her waist as cinched as apron strings
my lovely young mother
thirty years ago is twenty-four
practical, firm as the line of her lip
wants to be a good mother, a good house-wife
my heart, our household’s lonely ghost is
cooler than Mexican tile than deep black
granite with whisper-faint white flecks
her daughter, porcelain-fragile,
a ghost she longs to hold and
only pokes at, like a sponge cake from the oven
good mother, I’ve been absent –
I only met you two years ago when I broke
a saucer in a bleary-eyed fight and you cried
for once for your daughter and not for the mess
and I saw the movie playing behind your eyes
where you held me close and made a crack at
the green dust and said how you never liked it anyway
I met you in my kitchen and apologized and cleaned while
you watched and thanked me and hoped I’d feel
better in the morning, and I did after
I cried again as if I’d seen a woman’s
ghost in the brokenness, shattered ceramic, good
mothers aren’t actresses and life is not my screenplay
not as cathartic, not as sweet – I’ve left you in a hurry
weeks before I went away I was microwaving walnuts
for our brownies and I heard you say
you miss me already
it was eked out of you like last words
like a scratch on your throat like wallows in the walls
of a haunted house and I always want to cry around you
and lament my fatherless mother who can’t cry
or won't, for stubbornness, or won’t for anything less than regret
she misses me forwards and I’ll miss her backwards
I only just met you at seventeen when you stopped
caring about how clean our house could be
and you wanted to hear me speak
perform my poems, read through my little plays
God, as if you cared I said so callously and clumsily
it entered you like a bullet and burned another wooden bridge
I couldn’t read you my private papers
I couldn’t show you how I dared portray our home
my pen’s swift and seedy betrayal of my good mother shown as
a woman in Better Homes & Gardens with the eyes cut out
I’m more sorry for you than for me, she said to the wall,
that her old daughter is still so afraid
and too young to grow into her feelings and the plate slipped
out of my hands between the dishwasher and the cabinet
I’m done with this chore and I’m going to bed and you’ll regret
that my last month as your child was spent this way
and you said to your baby, I’m sorry
like the words were spilled milk
I got the broom and took care of the mess and turned
on my callous heel like a coward who lies like a devil who speaks the truth
like a ghost who poked the tenderness out of her mother
who cinched the quiet goodwill out of her hips
who scrubbed the silent granite til it bled
my screenplay climaxes thusly:
my girl, I love you but we speak different languages
but I love you with my whole heart
and I’m learning how to change
my mother, I love you and I’m coming home