Imperfecta

I knew what I was doing when I swallowed the glass piano.
It’s still a heavy burden. I read books and watch PBS documentaries on Victorian women who also carried glass pianos.
“You read too much,” Jared tells me.
“Glass delusions are what they’re called.” I tell him.
“I know, Audrey,” he says.
I find something romantic about privileged women who swallowed glass pianos, like mine. The ennui they suffered sounds better than my depression, more fainting couch than therapist’s couch.
Jared packs his trumpet to leave for practice. We both know he’s going to sit in the corner coffee shop away from PBS and glass instruments. I’m going to stay home and protect this thing that squashes my guts, huddles against my ribs, perches on my now-empty uterus.
I used to play a real, glossy black piano, wearing a black empire-waist dress. Jared’s trumpet sang love…

Content warning: violence

1.

south carolina

every night after work in
the white community,
mother sits in the sparse kitchen holding a
handkerchief because the seagulls always come
to visit her face,

her hands are calloused from
years of washing linen & changing
diapers,
i mostly see her staring into vacant
spaces thinking of brother doing time
in prison after he was caught lifting at the whites owned shops down the block,
of father somewhere in the distant city
buried between the laps of a new mistress with new
promises of invincible things,

with her, i have come to know
that what we call love is sometimes
a misplaced notion, a beatified delusion, a wishful thinking
on our part because I have seen her
nursed her wounds, christened them after father’s name, hoping they become flowers growing from tender scars…

2.

RUPTURED

brown skin girl,
your body is a relic…

Welcome to our new project Mother/Service/Voice. 70 + contributors will explore this theme in a range of forms and styles and approaches. We launch this project in honor of Black History Month UK.

For October 2020 we invited UK poet Jenny Mitchell to develop a prompt for our New Works Series at Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net). We held an open call for poets, prose writers (fiction, non- fiction), creators of visual work, hybrids and collaborations to submit unpublished work that examines the intersecting themes of ‘the Mother’, ‘Service’ and ‘Voice’.

Enjoy the results of this curation beginning Oct. 6, 2020 with new pieces every day for the duration of the month and into the month of November.

THE PROMPT:

Mother: Who are our mothers, our foremothers, our birth-mothers, our sacred/spiritual mothers? What sound/energy/emotion/history does ‘the mother’s voice’ (s) contain? Is it kind, stern, loving, beauteous, ugly, rageful, destructive, dynamic, undocumented…