Julia Lisella
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Julia Lisella is the author of Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007) and Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004), a chapbook. She holds an MA in creative writing from New York University and a PhD from Tufts University. Her poems have been widely anthologized and appear in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and on line at Literary Mama, Pebble Lake Review and other sites. She has received residencies from the Millay, Dorset and MacDowell Colonies for the arts and has held several grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In addition to writing poetry she is a scholar of American modernism and teaches American literature and writing at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Queens, New York, and makes her home in Medford, Massachusetts.
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Because My Mother Taught Me to Sew
I feel oddly delectable today
imagining you walking with me,
holding hands with me as we still sometimes do.
Because you are still alive, and not
completely out of your mind!
Because you’ve been my best teacher. My mouth
and my ear. My worried brow
and my deep-singing headaches,
my ability to providence and decipher
texts and the curses that once filled
your sweet little throat. You are
my crooked sentence, my selected house,
my inability to keep anyone’s secret.
In other cultures, the ghost of your own mother
would devour you, but here we recycle:
the ghost of her has been spit from your head
and you pile her insults
into the depths of my hands,
your storage, your cave, your pit,
your blessing house, the birthing room
of my fingers. I have lied to you.
I won’t release those curses; you can’t gain your freedom
through the embrace of your youngest daughter.
With joy we slip into tarantella, waltz,
switching places, but we return to our seats,
I do what you have taught me to do—gather up, stitch
more tightly, more tightly,
clever hems, unseeable seams, mending that mimics
the cloth’s tight weave,
voices inseparable from fingers or thread.
Old Body
Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom slept for longer
than we’ve been crying.
And didn’t that story begin
with the pain of parents and an only child?
I am two dead babies so far. One more
and it will be almost my mother’s story, too,
the same dumb well
that can’t wail and carry on for its own sake.
Though in comparison, my life is charmed,
no 17-year-old American girl
translating bank warnings and eviction notices
into Italian for her parents.
Still, my babies follow me everywhere,
enter our dirty mixed up family with tender feet.
Joining so many other ghost babies at the table.
And we’ve set places for none of them.
I am sister, mother, daughter to them all.
Grief in the half shadows though I want to
get on with it.
No shelter.
The wild little unborns scoff.
Either way you’ll join us, they seem to say.
When I turn my head in the car
i see one child, one car seat. The child is
smiling, dreaming of her birthday.
Perhaps the baby ghosts have lifted
their heavy business for a moment?
But instead of lightness
I feel only its strange borders
and no ending that can arrange this thing
for the moment when we awake.
Children
there is no mother,
only terrain
--Charlotte Mandel,
from “Sonogram” in Sightlines
No, no, I am
not done with you yet,
You two who fled
or were expelled. The universe
holds you without
my permission. I don’t know
if you can walk yet. Or have
words, or have seen earth’s diseases,
its ravage, its surly mountains,
its iced caverns, its desert lengths
where children are less alive than you two,
or if you’ve felt
more than your brother and sister
living on this side,
mothered, fathered with exacting attention
they can’t escape.
They don’t know you, and I,
only the limits of your power surface.
I called out to hold on, stay put
but to you such pleas mean nothing.
Oceans are your home
fog and cloud your natural blankets,
stars, dead stones shining
to light your crazy journey
along with the others, the peopled fields
collapsing out of my comprehension.
Children die, every day. You must
know them, too, now. How do they fare,
What is your death like? Why do you
Come to me, resting and working
your limbs into such deep ties?
There is no mother here,
only the surface of your father’s skin
on mine. Only desire
For this strange permission
that comes from, what?
To husband the deep-seated eggs inside the flesh
into a racing pool of live fish, sweet and delicious.
Did you take provisions when you left me? A sample
of skin, a small tin of blood and milk?
Did you remember to forget the sloping brim
of what held you, clasped you,
still young enough to swim freely
but old enough to leave
your mark here? Did you
leave anything behind,
a gift for your youngest brother?
Is that why he emerged amazed and startled
and would not look at me, but at the light
above my head? Did he mistake it
for the stories of the stars you left him?
Is he glad he did not follow your fishy trail
to the middle ocean, clean, bright with the life
of whale and shark?
