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Patti Wahlberg
Another Morning by Patti Wahlberg
I met a woman who told me
about the drowning of her little girl.
It was twenty years since that morning—
but she was still there.
She told it again and again
everywhere she went,
to everyone she met,
as if at any second
one of us might pull her out
and breathe her back to life.
Every morning it’s like that—
you hold your breath
and slip below the opaque surface
like a stone, sinking, cold hands
wrapping around your fingers
as you struggle
towards the light,
but when you open your eyes
there’s no one
down there
in the cold blue
except you.
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Breathe for Kylie Dawn by Patti Wahlberg My little girl shares with me
what she has learned—Earth may end
up like Mars. She can’t sleep.
There’s very little oxygen on Mars,
how would we breathe?
And the configuration of the stars
could shift Earth’s axis, send us flying
helplessly into space.
What if the sun explodes?
Or what if we end up like Venus?
Four hundred degrees Celsius—
how could we run barefoot in the sand?
Studying the solar system gives her nightmares.
I tell her to close her eyes.
Take it from the old and wise—
worry kills surer than a hole in the sky,
so sleep soundly. But remember—
when I come to tuck your quilt around you in
the middle of the night,
and you are as still as polished stone in the moonlight,
stir softly, breathe, so I can hear you,
breathe out the uncertain darkness, breathe in
the earthly dawn.
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Doom Flower by Patti Wahlberg Mother cats sometimes eat their young.
The weak ones.
Otherwise the babies might suffer
from a blighted bloodline.
So they bear them up to heaven.
I’m almost forty-seven,
the age my mother was
when she took her own life.
Rather than kill me, she left me,
or my own good—
rather than take all of me, she took
just a few small parts—
sent me to the picking fields
with no hands, for instance,
where I stood for years
like a dumb statue,
left me with no voice
to plead my case to the gods
or even to myself in the mute night—
and she took the gods. Drowned them
in her dark bottle,
drank them with her poison. Now my little girl, at six,
the new recruit,
makes up a silly song about me—
calls it “Doom Flower”—
and it makes me wonder
as I approach this birthday,
if I will allow myself to go
and meet my mother
and allow her
to bear up my release.
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