by Jacqueline Powers

It was my mother’s new Thunderbird
I drove onto a concrete divider.
Men straggled out of the bar to laugh
at it dangling there like a seesaw

then stared at me like I was home plate
but we were always some kind
of balancing act, two trains
on different tracks. In the Andes.

My mother was not the one who
made me, I’m pretty sure of that.
I don’t recall smother hugs
or the soft hover of mother-breath,

though there’s a brown-edged photo
of her gripping my hands at age three,
knee-deep as we both squint
into a brackish wavelet,

her hair long and starla smooth,
not gunmetal, primped into permed
submission. If giving birth is like spitting
a watermelon there were ants at this

picnic and I was always ravenous and wild.
She was from poor and needed her
2.5 TV’s, her trash compactor
and no flesh-flashing mini-skirt

was going to cut her from that herd,
daughter or no daughter.
Like that day she found us playing doctor
under the front porch behind

the blackberry bush. Her haloed face
in the dim light, mouth like a knife,
the sharp sound of slaps
against bare young flesh

and then, GOOD LITTLE GIRLS DON’T ––
Still, when I drove her to the airport
it was like I dropped into a pile of dry leaves
in autumn, ready for a match.

JACQUELINE POWERS’ work has been published in Blood Orange Review, The Dalhousie Review, Stone Table Review, Review American, and Iguana Review, among others. Her play, “Swimming Upstream,” was produced in Ithaca, N.Y.