Shana Ross – Ars Poetica

I would write about my mother but I’m not angry with her. She is the impression a bird leaves on the window glass, a dusty ghost print of wings, one small clump of pin feathers, glued with a single drop of gore. Do you dare look in the beds beneath to find the body? In case, you say, it was stunned and needs help. I’ve only ever found the corpse, limp and unbloodied, everything but an animating force. On a bird you might call it a soul, on a mother you’d want it to be something less spiritual, less universal. A domesticated word for the thing that makes you care to fly. If you walk into a room of poets and say “I have a story about a wire monkey mother,” everyone will want to tell it, and no one will tell it quite right. Or wrong. For a mother to be interruptible she has to exist linearly. Perhaps you string her between tin cans and pull taut – tighter, tighter, so tight a word or two can buzz from one to the other, and we will agree to call this act of distortion: play.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *