communion
in a 1940 photo my mother sports
a beret & snug pea-coat
her face unlined
& marvelous.
she’s about to light
what might be her first cigarette
a pall mall or lucky
about to ignite
her need for the world
by pulling it hard inside her
again & again
about to unleash
a columned blue spew
of talk-on-the-phone
or back-stoop
exhalations
on her mother-ashed
little cinder child
behind closed windows
in restaurants & cars
her cigarettes like wallpaper
& siblings.
dad & my uncles
school bus driver humphry
bogart even the doctor
every adult glamorous
or not
smoked my childhood
but mostly
I breathed my mother’s
smoke. smoke & coffee
smoke & beer
smoke
her constant halo
even after the hospital
& emphysema.
smoke
so sweet so constant
that old enough to know better
& looking like her young self
I filled my dorm room
with white clouds
of dream.
even now
I want to stand in the side
garden on a wet night.
I want to inhale
the cold
like my mother
who smoked for sixty years.
I want to feel the stunted
lift taste her prayer-braised
breath
& swallow
—as she did—the whole dark
& ashy world.
reach
after Left Hand, 2007 by Jenny Holzer
the inked left hand
raises its life-line
love-line
splays a young man’s
reach
surrendered
smudged
the rest of him
unseen captive
unknown & far from home
this hand-off/stand-off
this hard reading
of hands the way we hand-letter
on hand-made paper
unhand me
the messy way
we hand things down & over
the way my cousin’s unmarked
hands his pale priest’s
hands dug his mother’s grave
because hands demand
earth
blessing
a boy who left home
too soon
lifts his left hand
hurls dirt on the coffin
in the rain
touches air
water
earth
whose mother
this hand almost
reaches
endless regimented movement
after Stampede, 1989 by Annette Lemieux
centipede this mad-deep
many-footed organism
flick-steps
as troop. as business
as plague-bent
levers
as band
as cast
as murder-gathered
crows
toads
locusts
as lethal earth-march
in whatever company
whatever conjuration
we lurch-lunge
slice-stepping
well-booted
blood
wolf
breeds
our own
hunger
voicemail
my brother calls to beg my help with his granddaughter’s college essay.
we see each other rarely though he lives one town away.
still it’s odd that after he says this is your brother
he adds both his first name & our family name.
as if I had other living brothers, their last names all different.
as if I don’t see him in mirror-glimpses of my own set mouth
or in the shrugging gesture we both learned from our mother.
as if I don’t hear him in my own open Maine vowels.
as if, ten minutes older, he had not sparked childhood’s every mischief.
as if we had not hidden in the crabapple tree, crouched together for what
seemed like hours, while Bobby Bolduc searched & never looked up.
as if I don’t remember his anguish when our parents fought
or that one time when he hurt so hard, he broke an unbreakable window.
as if I don’t know how, despite successful law practice, his antique car
collection, his undiminished Catholicism and twenty-seven years of sobriety,
that break never healed.
Jeri Theriault’s collections include Radost, my red (Moon Pie Press) and the award-winning In the Museum of Surrender (Encircle Publications). Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, The Rumpus, The Texas Review, and The Collagist. A Fulbright recipient and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jeri won the 2019 Maine Literary Award for poetry (short works). Her teaching career included six years as the English department chair at the International School of Prague. She lives in South Portland, Maine. www.jeritheriault.com