Caroline Maun
MY MOTHER’S LAST PURSE IS A BAG OF POEMS
A small photo album, pictures of her
in her twenties, before her marriage
and children, bright slubbed silk bodice
dresses with circle skirts mid-calf
above spike heels, hat and gloves
to match, swathed in sunshine.
She left pregnant with a toddler,
but this small album also survived.
The flip phone is sticky now with years
of oozing. Passport in a plastic sleeve,
a map of our village folded to center
our house, marked with a star.
A savings book with ten thousand dollars even
in a bank near where she’d been born,
just in case she had to leave again.
MONUMENTS OF FORCE
A mountain is a tornado plus time
and turmoil, frothy lava and gripping roots,
a vortex of intentions.
Tornadoes can choose you,
and so can mountains—
their shadows, their faces.
Screw your heart up to a fist,
then let fingers out one by one,
blood warming and returning,
pointing to a universe turned away.
What you want may go unfinished;
ambivalence is also a gift.
Caroline Maun is the Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her poetry publications include the volumes The Sleeping (Marick Press, 2006), What Remains (Main Street Rag, 2013), and three chapbooks, Cures and Poisons and Greatest Hits, both published by Puddinghouse Press, and Accident, published in 2019 by Alice Greene & Co.