Mother's Clothesline

How the genesis of coldeheartedness towards men can be hereditary.....

Your Mother.

Sits crocheting on her couch,

cocooning memories of men she'd

      worn like sweaters

Each had quickly became

      worn and torn for her.

She'd stitched, sewed,  knitted them together,

Worn them on her back and arms

Covered her breasts with them,

Until those sweaters were just

      a mangle of yarn            stained from nicotine,

                              a ganglia

                                          of      loose       knits

             dangling.

Worn. And worn right out.

She'd fastened them

        one

        by

        one

        to her clothesline

with little wooden pegs. Her dummy men.

Eventually she bought a washer and dryer,

took up knitting,

relinquished her men:

the tumble of clothespins in the grass

      below the line--her speechless wooden pawns.

All those memories, out to dry.

Now she sits here, fretting venom into yarn:

they wronged me       wronged me       wronged me       wronged me       wronged

          mE.

Her teeth are gone,

Jagged pegs, stalagmites of rot

that can't even support

      half             a smile,

Gone-----are all the men.

A cat's cradle of yarn is

spun clumsy around the plastic fingers

of her prosthetic arm:

a tangled past in a false palm.

She'd scorched that arm off drunk,

      In bed. Smoking. Nourishing bitter whiskies.

      A baby down in her womb,

    Where she nourished hot rage for

                the man who spawned it.

That had been a tough one to wash off

      and dry out

      on the line.

Sitting here in her ramshackle shell

      of a trailer

             by the highway,

I take in her daughter's wet eyes

And realize I'll never thread her back together, not all the way.

Sitting there in that corner

       with her scissors of criticism,

               snipping me to shreds,

until I become a confetti

      of colored construction paper around her toes.

The mother's clothesline also pinned

the daughter's clothes,

the same way it imprisoned those men .

I'll be the empty mast of her soiled sheets.

                   Held up, flapping

                       to miserable, dirty sky.

Author's Note

I know thbis poem really needs help. I like it in places, in others I do not. It seems too long, maybe? The rhythm seems off. Any help here would greatly be appreciated.

Reviews

[Kenaz]

"spun clumsily" It's a great poem but it goes off a little about 3/4 of the way down. I loved the line "a tangled past in a false palm." Definitely keep that haha. Amazing though.

[James William Dyer]

Near the line "Gone----are all the men"...I noticed a syllable sound pattern disruption there, yeah the meter got fkjkjed up. I think actually the meter shoudl be patterned very erratic as in the beginning, but become more and more lucid as the poem progresses, as the Speaker comes to an understanding of what he is dealing with. It's like yanking teeth, though. I felt something was "sagging" in terms of sound towards the end. And I also thought maybe the Image-Chain was too long, like maybe I need to snip some of the images in a few lines to reduce length, being that there is a lot of image repitition. Good images, I like them, just they are the same metaphor describing the same thing. What specific line did you notice the fall0out during the end? I ask because it's hard to tell if your right or wrong if you're the one writing the poem, you know? Best to have another perspective here.

[Kenaz]

I'm not sure. I think at about "nourishing bitter whiskies."