Stories by Tina Carlson
Jackie is off her meds again
She’s been calling in the night, demanding sweets. My calm escalates her and she growls, fanged and wild, the girl I kissed before we were cursed. She sprinkled sugar on her tongue to enter my mouth and sucked on my lips in the dirt. I sampled the clods of chewed gum in her desk marked by the teeth of ten-year olds. Once we slept in mud to hide from mothers who wanted us clean. Stars winked as if we were in on a joke. She was caught in a pew, pretending to pray: shed donut crumbs on the priest’s black frock then bit his hand when he stroked her. Now she has tired of dirty toilets and women who call her a thief. She’s still is mine, the girl I loved in a ditch, incarcerated in a dream of long hallways grooved with stretchmarks. All the rooms have closed their mouths: she sleeps in a gown made by inmates. Her arms marked by scar she carved in code when our childhood horses went missing. I hear her echo through caves of my blood.
Natural History of an Unnatural Mother
On the bus in wintry Beijing, we were asked to practice our daughter’s names until we could say them well enough to adopt them: Chang Hong Xiao thirty times at least before I got it semi-right. In the meantime, the nannies piled out of a bus with a group of coat-clad babies in their arms. There was a storm of cries in the room as we entered, pure chaos. It was raining and two million girls were being abandoned or stolen under China’s One Child Rule. My daughter was dressed in layers of clothes, one sporting Tweety Bird and other American cartoon characters. She had been fostered by a young couple who kept taking her back and when I held her, she reached for them with a strength that was magnificent and terrifying.
Before that love was a slick thing, like an eel or mirror trick. I had sex with strangers. I tried to leave my body. I grew uterine fibroids the size of melons that had to be removed. You might say I was not mother material, and I would have agreed.
She had a clear gaze, thumbprint of red on her forehead for good luck, a tiny spigot of a mouth and the raft of a scar on her thigh. I gave birth to a new life in that wooden womb of a government building, with clean green bills and stamped forms. There in the bedlam, we became someone else. She cried for two days in my arms. Hong Xiao. For her the scared sparrow in my chest began a nest.
All the gods were there when she sang to clean water filling the tub, to orange fish in the hotel encased in glass aquariums. I felt in my heart the sea they must be missing, felt myself open as I fed her a little red bottle, it’s milky smell in her breath as she slept among the diesel fuel and tides of bikes in her town. We explored markets where cats were caged and restaurants made menus of insects. The world I knew turned inside out so pockets could hold what was loose in me: bright and private harms I held dear. She was a girl abandoned by her family and country and she grieved mightily.
We flew home with a flurry of parents and girls, most of us sick. She had whooping cough, anemia and malnutrition, and I had pneumonia when we arrived in Albuquerque. Over the next months I left carts full of groceries sitting in the parking lot while I drove home with her sleeping in the back seat. I lost my calendar full of important papers to a busy street of cars after leaving it on a vehicle’s roof as we drove from home. She watched from her car seat as I dodged traffic to get her immigration papers out from between the lanes. I was nothing if not sleep deprived and incompetent as a mother. But I loved her as if I were a lioness. Love, in fact, was a word overused, cliché. Instead, what I felt for her was mammoth as a mountain range, rising out of the ground into places only seen by snow and an infinite sky.
Tina Carlson is a New Mexico poet. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM Press, 2017), We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press), a collaboration with 2 other NM poets, and A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery (UNM Press, 2023). Her chapbook, Obsidian, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2024. She is an editor of the online journal Unbroken.
Back to Table of Contents for Fixations