Worries About My Mom
That if she made a will, she’d use it
for revenge. Why she kept losing friends
and if it was her fault. If she really
wanted my advice or just pretended to.
How I could say I told you so
in a light tone that got my point across.
That she’d become a hazard on the road,
but also how she’d get groceries
and medicine if she gave up her keys.
If her bones ached from weather
like she claimed or due to something
worse. When she missed my phone calls,
that she was dead or in the hospital
again, upset with me for reasons
I was meant to guess. How I’d know
when she wasn’t safe to live alone
and what would happen next. If she’d
received bad news she hadn’t shared.
How I could stop my thoughts
about her death from ruining the months
or weeks or days that we had left.
Trauma History with Revision
After Rebecca Lehmann
The first draft looks back at a childhood
in which no one got hit and still I sometimes
hid inside a book I could put down
if it made me afraid. When Mom swore
that we’d leave unless Dad sobered up,
I wasn’t sure whose side I should be on.
The next draft tries to trace how harm’s
been handed down through genes
and memory. But it also has to ask
if I’m being dramatic or too sensitive,
eager to blame the past for problems
I have now. Before 911, people
called our house for help and thought
I was my mom. This draft includes
instructions she trained me to give,
her bloody uniforms and grief
when sirens failed someone we knew.
The fourth draft holds a decade
of grad school. Along with lost friendships,
prizes I didn’t win, there was the year
my husband spent unwell, my anger
at our slow recovery. The fifth recalls
how even though I’d offered up
my uterus by choice, I still felt bruised
and stolen from after the surgery.
The next is less about the day
my husband died than the week
leading up to it, how I sat at his bed
waiting for more bad news until the end
was all I could hope for. The final draft
is filled with aftermath: laundry,
tears, the fear my brain works best
in crisis mode and enjoys hoarding hurt.
The final draft tries hard to live
up to its name, but I doubt it’s complete.
Carrie Shipers’ poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review, among other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections, most recently Grief Land (University of New Mexico Press, 2020).