Author Archive
Dead pine branches with long rust-colored
needles stuffed around the tires
a metal dog dish closest something to a shovel
digs through snow
spinning tires throw mud on eyebrows
and cheeks dogs with long faces
judge human nonsense
tires leave dark gouges in a once unmarked
expanse of white unstuck the truck moves
through mountains where thousands
of trees stand ankle-deep in snow
their black burnt bodies embellishing, re-telling
or forgetting memories to the best
of their recollections
On State Highway 4 past a Catholic Monastery
and a Buddhist Retreat
years of fluttering monks’ robes
brushed against and tarnished
walls holy cloth pressed against trust
and promise
Peer up to mountain homes of glass
down to humble adobes
cackles sound near a restaurant’s back door
where chickens roost on steps
with faded red, yellow, and blue paint
a jaunty multi-colored rooster
announces the woman’s approach
he big-steps past the goat whose feet
turn outward all four point left
the woman from the truck walks
to the fence the goat looks at her
gathers himself in a slow composed
sashay and walks sideways
towards the woman who watches
his wondrous submissive ballet
A U-turn surrounded by ancient red rocks
and the people of the unstuck truck
return through black trees still standing like sentries
back past the never-burned
and the splendor they shoveled
themselves out of to drive into more
nonsense and cravings of what people do
Mary Strong Jackson
February 8, 2019
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Grieve for the life you thought you’d have said the TV
doctor in a PBS fundraiser
is it my sister’s life
much like my mother’s
a home with grandchildren under foot
with assurances of how the next years will unfold
ever notice bits of good keeping on
even while much else has gone bad
when the kitchen catches fire
and the landlord says pay up
the dog’s brows furrow in worry
the neighbor leaves nasty notes
and we blame each other for being bad listeners
even the centipedes eye me with doubt
but for the first time my fingernails grow long
while we poke mud and sticks in the cracks of our world
an artist creates animals and fairies from mud and sticks
on the river bank to share with anyone
and when all the clerks in the store sour their faces
and the volkswagon woman with the “Give Peace A Chance”
bumper sticker flips me off and a longing begins for a cave with a few throw pillows
I stop at the light by the city park and a tiny prairie
dog runs to the point of the median too little to be alone
then his mother pops from a hole and scolds him to return
mama’s love independent babies
I took the wrong street once over and over again
found a hairdresser with gentle hands who spoke only Spanish
once my hair was cut by a Ukrainian
who shared her joy that my middle name, Alice,
matched her daughter’s
only she and my mother cared so for an Alice
When she said Alice I heard it glide from her lips like the word sluice
sluice – a channel for a flow of water that is controlled by a valve or gate- almost the same as a mouth
the Ukrainian hairdresser saw me in the sandwich shop
in Southend-on-Sea where I stopped to buy a sandwich with corn in it
which didn’t seem right
then the mother of Alice kissed me on both cheeks so sweet and so good
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she waited till her
black Irish brows grayed
after she’d wandered town
looking for tiny girls
she thought were lost
stopping at the man who sold cars
to inquire about the girls
he had no arms
but a finger grew from the place
his arms should be
a thalidomide baby grandmother said
and I imagined thalidomide man
holding girls so tiny he curled one finger
around their waists and when he turned
his head he was eye to eye with them
and when he looked forward
they stared at the moles on his neck
and hoped he wouldn’t drop them
now grandma seems like a dream
offering gingersnaps
and workbooks to do while
my tonsils shrink
wait long enough and dead people
are dreams you can’t quite grasp
and only remember
when something in the day reminds
like someone says icebox instead of fridge
and then your mother is old and dies
and you remember two women
getting old and then they die
though they once
ate brownies and tied their shoes
in the wind
Mary Strong Jackson
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Their bodies barely longer than a good-sized fish
sit in high chairs where fat feet
flutter below and plump palms pat
their trays. I pinch a piece of buttery
pumpernickel toast. Top it with a tiny
bit of egg, poke it in their open mouths –
baby birds in high chairs.
Their mouths and my buttered fingers meet
with a sense of each other the way grandmother’s
wrinkled cheek felt against my lips.
Their mouth-sounds ignite ancient
instincts to feed small ones to feed
each other with our fingers,
to know the shape of another’s lips,
the inside of another’s mouth.
No matter if a mother walked on all fours,
no matter if the first lovers ate off flat stones,
at some moment, they offered nuts
or marrow placed into the other’s mouth
with fingers slick on soft lips
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Outside my window
seconds of serendipitous light
and slivers of shadows
languish on an eave’s icicle.
I see a man turn ‘round
to greet a woman – the moment’s gentle
turn of head and shoulder
the surreal flow of mind and spine
cogs awakened to repeat the patterns
time and again
time and again to turn
towards another
by Mary Strong Jackson
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This poem is included in my chapbook, From Other Tongues:
“Litost” is Czech and the closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
Litost
she’d caught sight of it
in shadows like a mouse
along the baseboards
but this wanted her to see
and scurried less
seemed larger than before
she felt an unveiling coming
a reckoning
so she held a heavy blanket
one moonlit night and caught it
it had body and weight
afraid to uncover it
but feeling she must
she laid the heavy thing on the bed
unwrapped it at a snail’s speed
making her bones ache with effort
felt a clawing under her skin
once unveiled
it spelled out words
each letter carved
from parts of her
soot, grime, boils,
and blood
road rash and ringworms
she folded the blanket
around it
held it against her
offered warm tea
and rubbed it with oil
to soften each part that protruded
then she whispered as she rocked it, “Mistakes can be rounded away from sharpness. There will be no more dark scurrying.”
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The below poem and essay have been published in a book called, Missing Persons edited by Deborah Coy. It is an anthology of writings about dementia. The book launch in Santa Fe, NM will be at Teatro Paraguas on January 13th at 5 pm.
Standing
my father lies naked on the floor
I can’t lift him I call my brother
he can barely stand this I consider the portals
we long to slip through
I cover my father with a blanket
this body of his once lifted whole roads
these soft fists once clenched and swung
and pounded
we try to help my father stand
my brother’s feelings hover
like drone missiles wanting a target
years of shoving shoveling
and evading took our father’s strength
I want to stretch my legs into the sunset
my brother can barely stand this work
I pull underwear up our father’s legs
ask him to lean one way tell my brother
to pull the other side of the underwear
my brother can barely stand this
I call 911 to help us
raise our father
lift him toss him in the air
put him to bed spoon sweet food
in his mouth
we can’t keep doing this
my brother says
Mary Strong Jackson
You Don’t Understand I’m in a Jam
I wander through my parent’s home of the past 30 years, packing dad’s things for the nursing home. The sense of my mother being gone is stronger, as if an already dead person can seem more gone, but she does. I know which shirts she’d want me to choose for him, and seeing the stick pins all over the United States map showing all the places dad hauled farm machinery from East to West Coast makes the end of their lives together more visible and painful. This feels like dropping your last child off for kindergarten, but instead of a new beginning, it is the beginning of an end.
I carry his things into the Valley Care Facility, walk into his room, and see an old man sitting in a chair. He wasn’t this old last month. I note a new softness filling his body and mind. His metamorphosis feels disorienting. I see my hard-drinking, truck-driving, fist-fighting father become mellow, accept others making choices for him, and need me more than he’d ever admitted.
I fill out the social history paperwork for the nursing home. I check nothing under hobbies but write, “he liked to watch old movies, old Westerns, but not anymore.” My sister said you could have added, ‘He likes to drink, dance, and get in bar fights’. Even that behavior was years ago.
Dad opens his eyes. He has trouble finding words, so talking with him means playing a word association game. He makes connections like calling his room a cabin. Who wouldn’t want their tiny, shared nursing home room to be a cabin?
“The donkey we had for dinner yesterday was not good, but lunch today tasted better,” Dad says. He’s been reporting the various kinds of meat he’s been eating, and he calls them by the animal, so beef is cow, and pork is pig, but he has also mentioned squirrel, monkey, and duck.
“How’s mom?” he asks. “I saw her, but another lady is using her name.”
“Mom died two years ago,” I say. “Someone’s using the name Ruth Jackson?”
“I know she died. Yes, I didn’t know that happens. That they would do that.”
“Use other people’s names?” I ask.
“Well, that they shear a person like a sheep when they put them in the casket.”
“Hmmm,” I nod.
“I talked to your sister Babe. She said to say “hello” and she’ll try and see you soon. Babe always took good care of you, didn’t she? She looked out for you when you were little.”
“Yes, she did.” His chin shook, and tears run down his cheeks. I put my hand on his arm. Tears run down my cheeks. I’d seen my dad cry only a few times – when he was ill in the hospital and scared, when mom died, and now.
“I wish I could live by a river.”
“Me too, Dad. I’ve always wanted to live near water.”
Day 4 in the Nursing Home:
I type into Google:
“life expectancy of 81-year-old man with dementia and untreated non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”
“average length of stay by nursing home residents”
“life expectancy of 81-year-old man who sees dead relatives”
“old man with dementia in a nursing home with ungodly long toenails, sees dead relatives – sees his dead mother and the dead brother he liked better than the other also dead brother, and he asks his daughter to wheel him around the nursing home to find Brother Fred and their mother. He worries his mom is not being taken care of.” Of course, no help there. I don’t want him to suffer, but I know his days are not always comfortable. Or am I wanting to know how long I have to watch my dad’s downhill journey?
Later, “Can you put me in your car, take me home? I am in a jam.”
“It’s a new place, and you haven’t been here long, so it’s not surprising you feel confused.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve always been able to get myself out of anywhere.” These might be the most honest words my dad ever said to me.
I feed him chocolate pudding with whipped cream, and he says, “Mmmm” with every bite. He hadn’t lost his sweet tooth, it would be his last taste of sweetness.
“I’m going home now, dad.”
“Don’t forget I’m here.”
“I won’t ever forget you are here.”
“I thought you did last week,” he says.
“I won’t forget, and I promise I’ll see you tomorrow.”
By Mary Strong Jackson
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