“It’s Always been Cheese”
I am looking at the moon inside my mother “It’s always been cheese,” she says
In this dream I have Sinead O’Connor is gumming my kindergarten teacher Mrs. McCann’s 1994 over-perm
in what’s supposed to be Page Hilltop Elementary’s craft corner but is actually my grandmother’s bedroom vanity
their both naked
Signing the cross over a pair
of free standing breasts
Cooling in a bed pan
I can barely make out their
silhouettes now
Only the mountainous terrain
Of bodies merging
And Sinead’s distinct head-shape
Bobbing obscenely as she says “Canadian Clocks curb constant crime”
I nod furiously as if it were common knowledge
Mrs. McCann offers me a push pop
And a glass cigarette
The floor is a calico shag carpet
The floor is a conveyor belt
I am looking at the moon inside my mother
“It’s always been cheese,” she says
Pointing as it rolls out from between
Her thighs
until enough was enough
and enough was nothingness
Into nothingness And nothingness was:
too many nights amidst the sweet musk
of fruited smoke
Curling out in syllables
I had no language for--As if by incantation
Answered smoke with snake oil
But could not imitate the beautiful husky twang
of it
Of it
Exit.
I climb
the unnatural incline
Of my mother
towards the window
Where I might
have waltzed
in with the fog--
the room ‘s dark
and full of quiet hunger,
I drank from a spring
And knelt at the valley,
till i poured like daylight
from a jar
slow like molasses--
Before
I rise up and evaporate
my mother’s still counting
kernels
of teeth I left on the floor.
About the Creator
Ashley McCauliff
A Massachusetts native, whose heart is in Vermont. Received a BFA in creative writing from Johnson State College, Roger Rath Mark Canavan Award for best BFA writer in the program and a two week fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.