Moma: A Biomythography of My Mother

Moma: A Biomythography of My Mother

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Sometimes, it can seem like my mother is an average woman. But I know she is a storyteller, she is, much like Audre’s mother, a woman who can command a room and build a home/community out of nothing. Sometimes, I think she has the ability to conjure. This is why I call her moma, a respelling of mother/mama/mom.

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frost bit banks
hugging a river
dead as leaves rotting in the composts of
Drift Drive.
all the houses were old.
old as the church, old as the graveyard, old as the Swoonig Bar.

moma’s house was old as the river’s name,
even though it wasn’t a river no more.
it was a dry thing
that trickled and curled in, wanting
a name to be called

it was moma’s fifth christmas ever,
when all the lights were being twirled around trees
and the catholic school was trying to teach the littlest ones
like my mother
Jingle Bells

when granma stole them
away to those
frost bit forsaken banks
of that
Used to be River
 

cause grampa left them alone for some frilly little
thing
in a stewardess outfit.

the house. was big    and old      and rickety,
cracks and leaks and no working stove
making good meals was hard.
but it had that long,
sway-side barn that used
to hold twenty shining horses/ ready for pulling, plowing, and showing.

well, one christmas month, a bundle of kittens needed finding,
and some other ghost was found.
cause late one night, moma stayed up longer than she was suppose to
watching snowflakes
and heard a noise in the hall.

a lanky black man with brass buckles on his blue shoes
was standing with horror on his face.
he looked like he had been running for days/    or people
were trying to break down doors.
their eyes met and/        she screamed what he couldn’t

time came left
gran had gathered/   a stranger was roving
through her halls,
and by the time moma’s big brother bobbie searched
the place
that man was gone/ like he never was
moma, auntie sue wiled their way to gran’s bed, all three of them
sharing dreams of memories
they didn’t have

later for december
root beer dropped her bloated belly
but there were no kittens to show for it
all the cousins brought in for christmas dinner demanded to go
searching through snow/ no parent approved
root beer was licking her tail in the barn
and the kids made moma follow her around until the cat
jumped     up the rafters
and went missing
cause there was no attic or loft or
any sort of storage that they knew of.

so they made moma follow her up through that hole.
she spilled up into a secret room.

a molding, carved table
and chairs,
an iron bed,
a bundle of kittens,
white, red, black,
splotched.

and while her five-year-old self was distracted/ she stumbled out into the upstairs hallway
kittens and all/
asking why they never got to play in the room.

turns out, the original owners of that ancient house
had been part of the abolitionist movement
and,
rumor has it,
they helped runaways get across to the Canadian border, right off that underground railroad

moma thinks that that explains the blue, brass-buckle shoes.

when moma was nine, and sue was twelve, and bobby was twenty-one,
gran came home/        holding limes
Key Limes, expensive and precious and smelling like Home,
that the neighborhood gals had all saved up for
so they could have key lime pie at the neighborhood party that saturday.
which was really something
since the apples in quinn’s backyard were already being plucked.

but the pie never got made
and our family never got to party
cause bobby was dead/ on the floor/ of the upstairs bathroom.
we say it was an accident.

between eight dead cats buried in back to railroad spirits to his hands clutching at the air duster bottle/
gran could only handle so many ghosts.

south carolina was a lot more like home.
a lot more rum, a lot more limes.
a lot more of gramps’ calls,
talking always, always about his new son rob.

the old house never left
though
when moma dream walked

moma said bobby liked to visit in her dreams
always in the old house
he wouldn’t say much/ or anything at all
but she knew
when he had advice to give
he told her not to marry that musician

too bad she never was much good at listening

so what had happened was

handsome, moody
guitar strings of shakespeare
heard moma sweet-turning a crowd,
ocean waves background notes
and left her churning

short, she joined the band on escapades across state lines
all the way to alaska and back
one ring in the champagne
a wedding dress, worn, sitting on
a white horse
down a lane, with ribbons

too bad he was cold/ as the banks of that nameless river
twisting and turning
curled in, wanting
there were a lot of whispered rumors
a lotta warnings and tittling tales
before moma finally ripped that dress, beads all strewn on shores
to carolina

sometimes,
it’s letting go that finds you home
though
it took a few years/ a few lost loves before
she walked over nameless banks
again
house as lonesome as before

and found something a lot greater than ghosts
and broken memories
she found dad
the way it’s told, to me, there was nothing that could have held that love back
cause it filled that whole river
bursting