My Mother
/Harriet Weaver
is the coffee still in the microwave
and the note apologizing to the school.
She is Chef Boyardee, Hungry Man,
and a cheap homecoming dress.
She puts the Chambord in your champagne;
she knows painters, pilgrims, and Yale.
My mother is an open bag of wintergreen candies
in the midnight blue of the TV.
She is the bathroom door closing,
or the wall she might as well be talking at;
she is melting the coffeemaker’s lid by accident
on the surface of the electric stove.
My mother keeps a safety pin dipped in peroxide
perched on the sink like an addict’s spoon.
She is the bottom teeth in a grin,
the whites of my eyes in the mirror—
my mother is a darkened door
at the end of a long hallway.
Author’s Note: As a lover of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara, I enjoy litanies that build (in a sneaky way) to greater understanding. To me, lyric poetry is most effective when it feels like a direct experience of consciousness. In editing this piece, I cut everything down to the strongest concrete images so that the poem shrank into small stanzas, then into tercets, then finally into anaphoric couplets. A classmate did me honor when he responded to this poem with William Carlos Williams’ great line: “No ideas but in things.”
Harriet Weaver is a Los Angeles–based writer with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Yale University, where she studied with Harold Bloom. She was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books journal PubLab. In her previous career as an actor and producer, Harriet studied under legendary director Wynn Handman and brought shows to Broadway while working at Blue Spruce Productions. She was also an instructor of poetry and composition at UC Irvine. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wexford, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in LA with her husband and toddler.
