Featured Poet: November 2009 Vol. 2 #1
Jenna Bazzell
Jenna Bazzell is a third-year poetry MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a graduate assistant who has taught English Composition 101 and 102. She has also been an intern with Crab Orchard Review and currently the director of the Saluki Writer’s Project volunteer- teaching creative writing.
Nightgown
Think of what ghosts we slip into, or they into us. Other lives, gone
or not, like a shadow at night, like a sprawling dark, your hand pressed
palm-flat, to the window, to know something shields us.
Tonight, call back the ghosts you refused—listen for their steps
from the ceiling to your floor—a pair of untied sneakers, a pair
of stumbling bare feet. Such nights like this you find you’re spun
in your mother’s skin: the olive complexion of her freckled shoulders,
her neck slender bent over a coffee table, over a crushed white line.
Hand-cupping it. The intuitive way you know the film of pill dust,
how to test for your pulse. Other nights you wake with your father’s face,
creased, concerned as old photos over the past and even more, the present,
or smaller things: bread crumbs under the refrigerator, your tulips
dying, one summer after another, and how to tell you what skin
they wear, too, slips back years as it was before money wasn’t around,
your mother waiting in parking lots for drug dealers before she was committed,
before we had to move in with her parents. But tonight, your skin wears thin.
Lets them in. Like a smoke-thin dark. Like how death might look
seen from another side. Ash-thin. No place to keep them but here.
Like this: remember each time you pressed your ear
to your mother’s chest against her nightgown, or mimicked
your breathing with hers, you listened for her song as she sang to you,
its simple refrain reminding you: sleep is the closest thing to dying,
you never forgot as she must still be ripping her life from the buttons,
but carrying around our lives in that moment together.
Visiting Hours
And these walls won’t speak the words the nurse waits for,
that I have repeated and still don’t understand, that I am here
to see my mother, who is not dying exactly, but waiting,
no idea how to gauge time by the light of fluorescent tubing.
It’s low-level buzz robs each memory of sound, so that she
cannot recall music and voices, even the long sound of an
ashtray breaking against a wall. In her room, vents rattle
and sigh, cold air edges under the hospital bed, her eyes,
the color of iron; her face thin as the starched sheets,
her cheeks and collarbones sunken, the cotton gown
washed to the delicacy of lace, the rusty color of her voice
like dying light; her skin, her thinned legs, the rhythm
of her heart, now, mimicked in bleeps. Each day, she cups her hand
around my bicep as tubes dangle from the pit of her other elbow.
And each day, we walk this stainless hall to a patio between
two wards, both solid brick, in which she stares past the sun-
bleached chairs and barberry shrubs, into a world
she has been barred from. She sits in a pool of sunlight
tapping a cigarette loose from her pack. She tells me
there are ways out of everything. But one day, turns into two,
then a week and sometimes a month. This time, it has been a week.
She walks back through the unlatched door, her hair lit
with sunshine, a cloud of smoke rising around her.
Lampblack, coyotes drag their long howls through the moonlight
as pine trees nudge each other in the length of wind
and move from shadow to shadow.
The kudzu and the sweet gum drape over the gravel-slung road
where twelve gauge slugs sunk into the river’s clay banks
an up thrust of wheatgrass pods toss in darkness, as a series of telephone
poles stretch the length of dark ditches under a scalded sky.