Elizabeth Quinlan
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Elizabeth Quinlan has been a member of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences for the past eleven years. She received a Honors in Creative Writing from U. Mass /Boston. She was a finalist for the Richards Snyder Memorial Poetry Prize. She is a visual artist, specializing in the Book Arts and has taught art for over thirty years to diverse communities, receiving grant from the Boston Foundation and Child Care Choices of Boston, as well as designed and run teacher trainings in the arts. She was a lead quilter for the Faith Quilt Project, founded by Clara Wainwright. Her recent work is a sculpture/book, Stories of the Grandmother, a collection of collages, found objects, photographs and stories.
Promise Supermarket, a collection of memoir poems, was published this past summer by Ibbetson Street Press-- is the first of a three part series she is currently working on.
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The Doll
Betsy needs a doll,
my mother tells my father.
We go to Fox’s corner store—
shelves of cans, comic books
baskets of produce, milk, bread, eggs.
Below the crowded cash register,
in a glass display case, beside
the penny candy watermelons
and licorice sticks, is a six-inch
baby doll, in pink flannel diaper.
How much is it? my father asks
in his handsome gruff voice,
hand in his pocket,
tall in his dark overcoat,
gangster hat half over his eyes.
A dollar. He smiles: We’ll take it!
I am happy. At night
I go to sleep, holding the cold
plastic against my beating chest.
My father loves me, buys me things.
It doesn’t matter when a neighbor
boy calls it a cheap little doll,
or, when he drops it,
an arm breaks off.
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The Joke
My sister was three years old
I was six
half naked in our underwear
hungry, fearing
father’s shadow—
Come here, pal, give me a kiss,
enticed by his promise of a nickel
he held in his hand
he burst into laughter
thrust his tongue
in my mouth Yuck
taste of beer
his little joke French kiss
I see it from above
looking down from the ceiling.
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My Father Takes Me
to work with him.
We drive all over, while he picks up
large canvas bags of dirty laundry,
drops off brown paper packages of clean
folded sheets, shirts, towels.
The smells of bleach, soap and dirty
clothes mingle.
At one house he goes inside,
stays a long time. I get cold,
wait in the truck, worry.
Then a woman in a robe
shows him to the door.
She smiles, he winks,
her hand on his shoulder.
Back in the truck
my father smells funny.
We park for lunch, deviled ham
sandwiches, facing the ocean waves,
warm inside the truck.
I got to go:
I am special. I don’t know why,
is my mother sick?
Having the baby?
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Mental Test
My thin mother was pregnant, full
with Kate. She never left the house,
she stared at the wall. One day
she put on her blue suit, braided
her hair into a crown,
put on red lipstick.
A dark quietness
surrounded her absence.
When she came home and stood
by the sink, a sadness masked her face.
Anna and Brad whispered at night:
They might take us away.
Leah told Anna: I pray every night
they’ll take me. Anna scolded:
We might never see each other again.
They’ll never take all of us.
Was it the plaster holes my mother
showed the men who came?
She said Stingers shoot out,
hit my body and make me sick.
Or was it
the woman who asked her questions?
Was it the beatings neighbors heard?
They never called the police.
We stayed together, and months,
years later, whenever my father
called my mother crazy as a loon,
her eyes narrowed, her mouth
grew tight as she told him
They said I was a very intelligent woman.
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Promise Supermarket
My mother stands in the supermarket checkout.
The groceries on the conveyor belt are
oranges, cans of peas and corn, Wonder Bread,
milk, peanut butter, jelly, my Hostess Cupcakes
with the white swirl, carrots, bags of onions,
potatoes—and for soup, even a whole
cooked chicken in a can—
Her face is pale, sunken:
my father has taken her shopping,
a rare event, and gotten mad, something
said, done,
he has sworn, yelled, walked out
leaving her
to explain, to apologize, her face
shuttering with shame:
tying her worn black coat
from the forties with padded shoulders,
beaded front, tight around her, with us
walking out empty handed.
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