E. HUGHES
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
My Mother Speaks of a God
Across the room, you sit
on the couch at the edge
of the cushion: your
black hair standing
straight up, your
eyes drifting somewhere
beyond
the four walls of this place.
You speak of a god,
how he provides for you,
how he has shown you
how to be generous
with your money. As you
say these things,
you rock yourself
back & forth
the way I do
when it gets too dark,
when I hear voices;
I know this look,
a river carved in rock
between your brows,
the same as my own.
I want to reach
out my hand & bless
this tender space
between us, but I do not
offer to tear enough sinew
to move us beyond you
lying in your bed,
after getting high,
face down, beyond
your furrowed
Fuck you
as you splattered amethyst
wine on my counter.
Big Mama
—For Kim and Marie
even now
as she pushes these memories
around with her tongue
my mother hesitates; still
she tells me
about the way you jaunted
in your wheelchair with
a flung-open bible
& a secret
pistol,
that on Sunday mornings
an ivory skirt billowed
over the stumps
that were your legs, that
you nursed your son
in his old age:
you both in twin wheelchairs,
his drooped face,
you brushed his greying,
wool hair.
As she sits, fifty-three & alone
in bed
my mother manages only
cool whispers
summoning
from the earth each
of your molecules,
summoning from me
tendon & heart-bone
to fill all the places you left her
empty.
E. Hughes is the first annual winner of the Mireyda Barraza Martinez Poetry Prize for Social Justice. She has poems forthcoming or published in The Antigonish Review, Joint Literary Magazine, and Matador Review. In 2017, E. Hughes became a Hurston/ Wright fellow.
Shockingly and movingly vivid! md