Lizzy Chemel, from Unset #1, 2019 (Artist Website)
16mm Film Still
Lizzy Chemel, from Unset #2, 2019 (Artist Website)
16mm Film Still
For Kigali: “a first time mother [who] gave birth to two cubs Friday before eating them Monday” (CNN)
I remember hitchhiking to Kansas when I was
eighteen. Never once thought of my mother,
sharpening her teeth in the kitchen. How animal:
her ways of preparing. How animal. That traceless center—
the inside of the truck warm
like a pelt of fur, like my mother’s shoulderblade:
there in the pitch and roll of highway. Once saw her
milk a bone dry of marrow, smuggle a steak knife
beneath her pillow in case — her neck pricked
with tiny mistakes come morning. Once saw my father kneel
bone-tired to lace up her snow-shoes. How animal:
her stalky walk. Her keeping. No lions
in Kansas; no mothers either. Just stalks bent earthward.
Wheat tipped like mother’s next question
how late there, how long there, and why there?
Might as well be a jungle: those weather-scraped
plains. In need of a cyclone to uproot my own
hitchless ribs, my light-left eyes. Each day a study
of my body’s unbecoming — my skin more like hers
my mouth more like hers, my hammock of muscles,
her fevers. Fevered, I once saw my mother blow a house
down. Roar life in the body of a cluster of seeds. When caged
she eats daylight. She eats daylight often. She knows
there are rules. Some mothers eat their young, I tell her
down a phone line. When they sense something’s wrong.
Some mothers unravel and never stop unraveling:
the whole story. The midnight call. The confession:
I said no over and over
And of course it’s never really a jungle. I got in a car once too
she says down a phone line. And she swallows
my tiny life. My mutiny done once already. Once
I remember her dreaming. Her long body there on a sofa green
like the tops of trees. Jungle fever. Her legs’ spasmed urging
like trying to run to her Kansas. Like trying to stalk. Like
moving to swallow each and every wrong thing passed down —
how animals, like Kigali, know a plan and stick,
thinking what gets swallowed’s what gets kept. Theirs
for defeating. Their wrong for righting, their Kansan
flat walked: where the world gets cageless. Where their children:
cageless. Once I saw my mother watch the light hit
my shoulders. And inside her — animals seeing
in their cages, in their children, in their wanting.
Mistaking the light for leaves