Memos for My Mother
At the top, the page said “Memos” in green
letters and my mother, eight and sharp
as fresh-turned graphite pencil, drew the crinkled
face of a bulldog in the margins. Across
the lines in slippery cursive she cut
her stories: Memos the bulldog picks up
sticks, Memos goes to the beach, Memos gets
a brand new puppy dog. Pronounced MEHM-us,
the dog found himself in mischief often
as mom did—after pedaling fast through
Mrs. Poodle’s begonias, Memos first hid
inside the cedar chest but soon, after prayer,
appeared on her front steps, arms spread wide
and cried his famous line I did it! Spank me, Mrs. Poodle!
*
As per the American Kennel Club’s
guidelines, a bulldog’s demeanor should be
“pacific and dignified” not “vicious
or aggressive.” The proper term for folds
of the face is rope, and on average
the bulldog lives only six years and three
months plagued by cardiac struggles
and its kingly weight. The University of Georgia
keeps pure a sickly lineage of dogs
named Ugga, likely first models for Memos,
and in my abridged copy of Jack London’s
White Fang, I saw drawings of a bulldog
dead-clamped on the wolf-dog’s throat
until a savior wedged a pistol through its jaws.
*
The Pug is the bulldog’s most miniature
kin, and my mother once lined four just-born
pugs like fat croissants on the bathroom floor,
their roped muzzles black like their mother
who panted rough beneath my sister’s bed
where we found one last fawn puppy slick
and ancient-faced. In his last moments,
my mother breathed into his slit-thin nostrils,
placed a finger on his still, small chest, cried
for he had been the largest, most viable,
not a runt fated to be abandoned, denied
milk while fuller siblings suck and keen,
just a first-time mother’s shocked mistake:
finding herself spilled out, she waddled away.
*
Like my grandfather, who, last time I saw
him, chortled beneath my stout Corgi on
his withered chest, my mother cannot help
herself with dogs: she holds their faces steady
to hers and lifts their lips to see the snarl
beneath placid eyes, she palms a rhythm
on their sides, she lets the bird dog slither
next to her on the leather couch and holds
him while she naps. She even wipes the aging
pug’s folds with a Q-tip, laughs at memories
of how her boulder-maw and blunted canines
would quell any violence in our house:
after the first time, we’d fake smacks and yell
for her to save us, fierce as a mother raptor.
*
The day my mother slapped me for calling her
a woman, we were in her bathroom
where before the light-soaked mirror, she tilted
upside down to blow-dry damp brown hair,
where she rolled lotion on firm, golden legs,
where we sidled in to seek approval of skirts
and necklines, where the powder floated thick
as moon-dust leaving a fresh layer shining
on our blackest tights. And because it was there,
she must have been naked, breasts shaking
with the force of her hand against my face,
I think she did not like my dress, I think she did
not like my tone, sarcastic and whiny,
asking What do you want from me, woman?
*
According to Wiki-How, a memo
should be direct, should eschew formal
salutations, should end on a positive
note that makes recipients feel warmly
towards the sender. Like his namesake,
Memos’s stories did not go for long,
their tiny writer having learned too soon
the virtues of brevity and succinctness,
how excess must be trimmed. Cixous tells us
We need what we waste. To write is always
to make allowances for superabundance
and uselessness. The tiny writer did
not waste: the sheets lined back and front with words,
teaching Memos the bulldog what she knew.
*
The Corgi is known as a puckish beast—
bred to boss the cattle as its back grazed
their udders and its teeth their haunches—
so it is no surprise when my Corgi
plants his paws on evening walks, refuses
to move on until he’s claimed the patch
of weeds or the neighbor’s mailbox,
lifted his curt leg to send his brisk message
to the Yorkie down the street. And because
I am known as my mother’s daughter,
with anger beneath my face that bursts quick
as azaleas the first warm night of March,
it is no surprise when I jerk his neck
too hard and steer his sturdy body home.
*
My mother told me once she never felt
slighted as a woman, a muscle in her jaw
popping in and out like it does when
she clenches her incisors tight on the neck
of argument, about to wring it dead.
Another time she told me how her father
laughed when she told him she would not work,
would probably just get married after college,
and how she suspects he had her schooled
for that exact purpose. And she told me
how, if my date touched me at the movies,
I should gently take his hand in mine
and place it on the armrest, no scene, no
mess, just dark and quiet like inside a shut mouth.
*
Mother, I am searching for our breed
in the catalogue you keep by the bed.
I try not to pound the coffee table
when I argue with my husband, I keep
my voice so low and steady, and when
I break and scream and stamp I wonder
if I am fighting you, and if two women
fighting cannot be a kind of love, too. I try
to love my excess and my stillness
and I long to curl warm as the bird dog
does against you, to have you examine
my pointed teeth, want you to write my simple
story, the one where I open my arms and know
the punishment will end with feeding.
Ode to Sex and the City
I watch the episode where Carrie’s nude
strapless dress is ruched all sparkly down
the bodice and hangs in mummy-bandages
from her crotch to her ankles, those skinny
knees pop out and into sight in rhythm
like manic, tan birds in a cuckoo clock.
She is at a wedding. She is reading a poem
about love. If my friends asked me to write
a poem for their wedding, I’d likely cut
my hair and dye it Miranda-red, drive
down I-10 to Louisiana and get a blue
thigh tattoo of the fleur-de-lis, and sure,
Carrie’s scared but she’s still blond corkscrews
and un-tattooed (as far as I know, it’s only
Season 2 and I’m on my first binge-watch).
Predicted Plot Twist: the ladies grow claws
and beaks and rip intestines from unworthy
suitors in broad daylight, then rendevue
at chic rooftop venue for chai lattes or whatever
they were drinking in early-aughts New York.
Season Four takes place entirely feathered
and nests are lined with two-hundred dollar
haircut clippings. Occasional verse for egg
smashings and ripples in street puddles.
Can you tell I’ve never been to New York?
My favorite friend from high school
owns her own restaurant with her Turkish
boyfriend and works for Proctor & Gamble—
she’s throwing a wedding bash for herself
there even though she lives in Cincinnati
so I guess I’ll finally see those big-ass
buildings, grey and grey and grey. I hope
she wears a red dress, an ostrich feather train,
a hairpiece that sprays like a fountain.
I hope we skip the fake sendoff, sparklers
and confetti and poses with the Mustang
convertible as the venue attendants sweep
and smoke, which is what I love about Carrie—
the cigarette she’s smoking on the cover
of NY Mag a couple episodes earlier, “Single
and Fabulous” question mark that shakes her
confidence like a salsa. I read once that cigarettes
punctuate your life, I’ve never smoked one
but I’d love more structure to my days,
grammatical lilts that tell me when to fake
the end and keep on going, semicolon carcinogens
are what I’ve been missing, along with eagle
yellow irises and blood in my talons, fresh tear
from the ribs of accountants or lawyers,
the tenderest flesh to season the stew,
like the collards my grandmother boils with hunks
of low meat. She got married in New York
as well, on a prototype reality TV show
called American Wedding with some New Yorker
yammering in her ear, telling her to answer
“Where is Rowesville?” with “About twenty miles
from Branchville” to big laughs from the studio audience
about these gorgeous hicks, their podunk lives.
My occasional poem for her would have purple lipstick
and cuss words, it would tell her she’s fast and sexy,
a falcon in a dive bringing the skyline down with her.
Dorsey Craft holds an MFA in poetry from McNeese State University and a BA in English from Clemson University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, Rhino Poetry, Southern Indiana Review and elsewhere. She is currently a Ph.D student in poetry at Florida State and the Assistant Poetry Editor at The Southeast Review.