By Lisa C. Krueger

Featured Art: Day 7 by John Sabraw

I.

In the photograph
my mother is ten;
she poses in a ruffled dress
and hand-me-down coat
that swallows her arms
the way shame swallows
people whole.

Lost in the oversize. Standing
near a clapboard porch.
She knows she is poor,
one of the poorest; her shoes
are too tight. Other children
tease her about the key
around her neck.

My mother makes drawings
of what she can’t buy;
it will take years, and
thousands of dollars,
for her to learn that money
does not make her happy.

In the photo, my mother smiles
upward like the glamorous people
in magazines. She tapes sketches
of stars to her wall, studies them
before she falls asleep.

II.

My grandmother sews clothes
for my mother; she doesn’t
need patterns, she has learned
to make things on her own
from what her mind can see.
My grandmother is a bank teller,
on her feet all day; tellers
are not allowed to sit. Only night
belongs to her. My mother
hears the machine, an animal
that growls in the dark.

III.

My mother’s walls are rich
in the way my daughter’s walls
will be, covered in desire.
My daughter will labor
over vision boards, collage
pictures of people and places
to help dreams come true,
what vision boards can do.   

My daughter will stack magazines
by her bed, take scissors
to girls playing sports
with those beautiful bodies,
magnificent boys with interested eyes.
Picnics – dances – all the weddings –
cut out –

IV.

Sometimes, awake
with my own futility,
what I can’t do for my child,
I will picture the grandmother
I never knew,
bent over small light,
laboring. How many hours
to stitch ruffles?

V.

Standing, my mother crosses
her legs, an awkward pose,
perhaps one she has seen
in a star.  Balanced forever.
Pinned to a wall.

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Lisa C. Krueger, Ph.D., MFA, is a clinical psychologist. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner, and with Red Hen Press. She has published articles on the creative process and parallels between poetry and therapy as well as interactive journals for girls and women. Recent poems have been included as finalists for the Catamaran Poetry Prize, the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, the New Ohio Review Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. Red Hen Press will publish her fifth book of poetry, Floriography Child, which will be including the poem, History of Desire, in the fall of 2023. She maintains a therapy practice with subspecialties in health psychology, women’s issues, and writing therapy. She lives in Pasadena.