Three from Christie Beckwith
Bury the Elephant
Let’s play a game called gardens and graveyards.
The only way to see what grows is to bury it.
I’m thinking about the dash on a headstone,
the vapor that betrays a living breath in winter,
how a mouth can be both a cradle and a casket,
The most critical job goes to the tongue
what it offers, the comfort it withholds.
Ashes or dust, the ground after rain smells familiar.
Is this why we call the earth our mother?
Does her silence swallow you, too?
I Drank a Yard at Mario’s
were the words on the T-shirt my mother stole
from a free meal with a porn stache.
The shirt became a staple in our wardrobe.
Its yellow plastisol letters cracked like lines
on the road after years of shame walks.
There is no shame in a woman figuring out who she is
through the lens of what she does not want.
I pretend this is true for the sake of poetry.
My mother traded her childhood
for her womanhood, but that’s a different poem.
She found escapes better than whiskey
at the local bars. Bottled up,
Hobo, Gary, and Bob—her weak-knee trinity—
of muscles, mustaches, and mullets.
Alan Jackson could have been my dad.
I pretend this is true for the sake of poetry.
A mother and her oldest daughter are often cut
from the same cloth. Her clothes start to fit
as the fabric blends between them.
We are a cross-stitch of child and parent—
too similar to see what is best
and too different to fit into the threads between us.
As much as I want to look like her, I’m just a girl
trying not to shrink.
There is no need for her to tell me she is proud
of how I’ve stretched into new and vibrant colors.
I pretend this is true for the sake of poetry.
True Story of Lost and Found
My mother has this picture of me
napping in a wooden toy box
in metallic blue tights.
I’m surrounded by my Bedtime
CareBear, My Pretty Ballerina, Raggedy Ann,
and a troupe of naked Barbies.
Somewhere below me, my brother’s
Metallica tape is lodged
in the back of my Teddy Ruxpin.
I awake one night on an impulse
to leave. I don’t know why—
Curiosity? Stupidity?
I pack the essentials—
clean underwear, socks, and
my favorite action figure.
She-Ra does not go gently into that good
bag. She rustles the plastic.
The noise wakes my brother.
He commands me to go back to bed.
I thought I wanted to understand the magic
of a streetlight stabbing the dark.
But in this moment, being afraid
of my brother protects me.
I’m too young to understand
reverence for a savior, but not too old
enough to lose one.
Outside our window, the crickets trill
to the bruised night sky.
I will find other ways to run.
Christie Beckwith is an author, poet, and freelance editor at Meraki Press. More importantly, she is a sparkle girlie and an excessive consumer of Dunkin's coffee. You can find her at open mics and all over the US, where she travels for her day job doing Alzheimer’s research. She wants to live everywhere she visits, but is always happy to return to Massachusetts, where she loves her three boys, the cat, and their two dogs.
