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Emily Ransdell
I DREAM OF MY MOTHER
What a gift a dream is, unencumbered
by truth or time. Let’s say it’s 1963.
Mother is feeding a fresh sheet
of newsprint into her typewriter,
a late-model Underwood, gunmetal gray
and muscular on its rickety stand.
She looks lovelier than I remember,
hair the color of bourbon in sunlight,
hazel eyes and that Irish skin.
She turns the black rubber roller
until the paper reappears. Her small hands
hover. Then the fury of her fingers,
her right hand slapping back
the carriage again and again.
On her desk, an ashtray and the thin ghost
of a burned-down smoke, a cup of black coffee
and an apple. A half-eaten hard-boiled egg.
She is slender as ever in her peplum jacket
with its covered buttons and tiny waist,
tracking her calories in a steno pad.
Mostly she’s fueled by nicotine,
a car driven hard all day then throttled down
with Jack Daniels and a Sominex before bed.
No wonder she was always angry.
She must have been starved.
If I was in charge of this dream
I’d make her a meal but I’m on the other
side where she has been dead
a dozen years.
She was a working woman,
narrow skirt and kitten heels.
Would she have dared
to eat something rich and outrageous?
Crème brûlée, perhaps, silken and glowing
with an unbroken burnt-sugar top.
Here, mom, I would say,
handing her a spoon. Go ahead.
Break it. Shatter it like glass
and eat.
About the writer:
Emily Ransdell’s first collection, One Finch Singing, was the winner of the Lewis Award from Concrete Wolf Press and was published in 2023. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, New Letters, Terrain, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Emily lives in the Pacific Northwest, dividing her time between Camas, Washington, and Manzanita, Oregon, where she teaches poetry writing at the Hoffman Center for the Arts.
Image: A Woman at Her Typewriter. AI-assisted digital image. Proprietary image. 2024.
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