Attic, and: Drawing with My Mother, and: In the Queue

Abstract

Attic, and: Drawing with My Mother, and: In the Queue Connemara Wadsworth (bio) Attic It is a museum of disuse, we findkeys, open trunks untouched for years. Top hats for my brother. For me,brittle dresses with hand-sewn seams velvet ribbon, lace, rows of tiny turnedbutton holes for silk knots. The dress I try on, show Grandma,is too long. Whose was it? It is a house of dust and clutter—our father's siblings, all but one still at home. Grandma complainsabout our mother's cooking, and says she should wear a nightgown.She makes my brother and me eat our peas. I throw them up on the table.Sometimes I rummage in her button box, wood ones taken from bvds. Like beadsshe threaded white ones from shirts frayed [End Page 116] left in the ragbag. I sort the lifetime of them.If we ask, she recites "Paul Revere's Ride." Sometimes she closes her bathroom doorbangs and bangs an enamel cup on the sink. Her cotton stockingstwist and wrinkle at her thin ankles. If only she had as many stories asbuttons. We are too young to search for what else might be in her.Our mother tells us Grandma doesn't have all her marbles.We don't know the weight her words carry, we understand onlyour mother's trapped urgency, that a fury, unnamed,lurks within the house. Drawing with My Mother Outside, the arched windows,the rise of a bridge and the canal. I add color but noneis close enough. "It's easy," she saysand draws for me a still life [End Page 117] on the back of a paper bag,oranges ripening by the minute. She says, "Form. Weight. Depth.Negative space." I see more perfectlywhat she hasn't even noticed. In the Queue My mother, so tall to lose in a crowd,lies blanketed on a gurney indistinguishable from other blue-gowned patients waitingfor the OR. Only when the doctor told her she was weakening and without surgeryshe wouldn't have enough breath to climb Venetian bridges again, she no longer pressesto try homeopathy, herbs, acupuncture. An IV pumps medications into a veinin her bruised, papery skin. Still she talks of her next trip, her latest painting, news.It is inevitable that she will rise from this place to go her own way.On her skeletal wrist a band with her name, date of birth, next of kin—snapped therelike those for tracking wild birds. [End Page 118] Connemara Wadsworth Connemara Wadsworth's chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early 50's, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have most recently appeared in Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Valparaiso, the Kentucky Review, and the Mayo Review. "The Women" was nominated for publication in Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses by Bloodroot Magazine. Wasdsworth and her husband live in Newton, MA. Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press