August Pastoral
Going Away
Inside My Mother's Brain
Imaginary Son: After
Triolet with Baby Teeth
Today in My Mother's Dementia, She Is Working in a Hospital
Hanging My Father's Crucifix
Final Walk Through
Agoraphobia with History of Panic Disorder
It’s going to be August,
soon, so let us
pick the last tomatoes
in the waning garden,
hold the drooping leaves
between our fingers.
Another storm swirls
in the far away sea,
and a week from now
will smash our windows,
our fence, this yard of wild
blackberry vines. Take
my hand, praise the still sky
before the power is out,
again, before the wind
splits the heavy headed
sunflowers between us,
snaps tree limbs into our
quiet street. Before this
is nothing but splintered
boards, broken lawn chairs,
a yard of debris. Let us
not forget our humid sleep
will fill with chainsaws,
generators, drown
the nightbird song, so let’s
bring in our summer
squash, watch the dragonflies
circle the bare stems
of our almost pumpkins.
Once again, my mother packs
what she can remember
into every suitcase she owns. She can’t
recall the toast she had for breakfast,
but she remembers the wine goblet
from her first trip
to Switzerland, where
my father almost missed
the train. The turquoise
bracelet from New Mexico,
a figurine of a child
holding a blue bird (Germany,
her wedding, scatter of rice
the pigeons took away.) She
packs picture albums to help
her conjure our names. Garnet
earrings my father gave her before
he died. Sweaters, pill bottles.
Mom, where are you going, I ask.
She pulls books from the shelf.
I’m moving, she says.
To where? I unpack her topaz ring,
a gray blanket, a faded photograph.
She grabs her best coat, says
Your father will carry these to the car.
Where are you going?
Your father will know. Ask him.
There is a train station she visits each day. She carries her suitcase and blue hat. It is 1942 and she asks if I’m safe, if bombs are dropping on my house, if I’ve seen leaflets in the town center. In my mother’s brain, she will spend the day making roast chicken and ham for the soldiers. Later, she will pack picnic baskets, fill them with jam and cooked meat, thick bread, and march them to the front. In my mother’s brain, I’m 15 and it’s 1992. She waits at the end of the driveway for the school bus. I’m right here, I say. I have to pick her up from school, she replies. In my mother’s brain, I am eight and she wakes early to slather peanut butter and grape jelly onto bread, to pack an overripe banana and potato chips into a brown paper bag. I can’t find the cookies, she says. In my mother’s brain, there are babies and seagulls and my father is still alive, in another room, at the hospital, down the hall. He’s fixing something. He needs a hammer. He’s at the window asking her to open it, let him in, it’s raining.
When my imaginary baby died,
people came by with casseroles,
sent cards of white birds and crosses.
This is how it is done:
a doorbell rung, Corningware’s
blue cornflowers left
on the stoop. I opened each lid,
peeled back tinfoil to breathe in
the chicken and rice, the soups.
Some sat with me, would think
she is piling magazines, stirring cold coffee.
A catalog of my stages of grief.
I would do this, too, would say I am
watching a blue jay, I am making tea.
I have opened a door.
Now, I am closing it.
after a photograph from CNN
Three teeth in her palms. Dull jewels carried
in her back pocket through the desert. Her children
wait across the border’s razor wire, their
three teeth in her palms. Dull jewels carried
across the Rio Brave Del Norte. The air
and its rumors: tear gas, a mother with
three teeth in her palms. Dull jewels carried
in her back pocket through the desert. Her children.
Today in My Mother's Dementia, She Is Working in a Hospital
My mother holds the babies in the nursery. The babies are so small like you were. She’s stuck again. She’s been watching a television program about midwives and now she’s a nurse taking blood pressure, wiping brows in 1962. The babies are transverse, breech, and she needs the doctor. The babies are hungry. Would it be okay if I rocked them? It’s okay, Mom, I say, and already she’s moved on to talking about the recent rainstorm, this morning’s scrambled eggs, asking me if I need to be picked up from school. What about the babies? I ask. What babies? she asks. The babies in the nursery. She’s quiet, her memories tangled. She says to call back in thirty minutes and she’ll have more answers. I know this means she’s forgotten about the babies, the nursery, who I am. I listen to her breathe, imagine images spinning inside her: baby bonnets, damp diapers, my father, me. She begins to hum. I tell her I’ve got to go. Goodbye, baby.
When my father died,
my sisters and I emptied
the house — task of boxes,
broken blenders, icons
of saints. I stood on a chair
and took down
my father’s crucifix. Thick oak
cross, brass corpus. Christ
forever reaching out
his exhausted arms into the room
where my father slept, coughed,
wept. The one I lift
onto a new nail in my own home,
slide my fingers over
the delicate body, the head
wrapped in thorns. This sorrow
of feet and wounds glued
to a bed of wood, hung
where no one can touch him.
I step back.
My father is gone.
Raccoons destroy our old house.
They crawled through the pet door, where
the dog would drag in leaves,
muddied sticks, our neighbor’s garbage.
The raccoons climbed
the pantry shelves, tossed down
number two pencils, notebook paper,
a leftover jar of tomato juice,
smashed
until the linoleum looks like
a crime scene. The living room is confettied
with a chair’s stuffing, the fabric
my mother picked out
shredded
across a scatter of old encyclopedias, a single
forgotten shoe. In the kitchen,
the wallpaper peels down
to its 70s style — orange teapots, yellow
flowers, gold swirls that once
matched the Formica my mother sat me on
to spoon medicine into my mouth, to smooth
salve onto bee stings. The dining room
empties into the living room.
Gone: piano, loveseat,
my father’s oak table he made
while I hammered nails into wood scraps.
Each bedroom: pet stains,
dead leaves, stiff bodies of bugs.
My parents are gone, too—
one in the grave, one unable
to remember my name. I take this
image and upright the chair, sweep
the floor, open the windows
for air. The lightness spirals
through my hair, my fingers.
Throw back the sash of memory.
Lean toward the waning light.
Agroaphobia with History of Panic Disorder
You close the door
to oak trees, sandcastles,
thrift stores with their rows
of vases and handbags. Nothing belongs
to you anymore. Not
the limbs heavy with blue jays,
coffee shops, a church pew. You forget
what it feels like to open a menu,
to drive a car, your body’s
former self made quiet. There is no
trigger warning for fear
of the outside world.
Instead,
you can’t touch a shopping cart
without thinking Ebola,
Monkey Pox, Covid. So you avoid
the cart with its bright red apples
and loaves of fresh bread. You buy
tickets to the theatre and never go.
You open the curtains and see
sunlight on zinnias, think
this is what joy must feel like —
a pink blooming in the rainwater
and earth. How you were once this
joy: green-sprouted, unfurled.
Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, UCity Review, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a contributing reviewer for Rhino and Indianapolis Review. She lives in Houston, TX.
