Issue 3:2 | Poetry | Leatha Kendrick

Three Poems by by Leatha Kendrick

Apartment of Her Own
She eats before the patio's glass door, outdoors
reflecting
in the mirrored wall beside her. She chews on her life
so far
—or not.  She eats and looks out as if inviting the
empty
sidewalk, the cockapoo tugging a lady into view to
share
her cottage cheese and happiness.  Peaches

spill off the sides of her spoon, a grin for no one
but herself.  The bare walls comfort her, the radio.
She hears what she wants, mostly listens
to the silence, selecting herself
like a chocolate, set down in her box,

among the layered others whose flavors she
is not responsible for (at last).  The children
smiling out of their frames will be home off and on.
They will laugh at this mother grown silent,
smiling back at them.  They'll shake their heads

at this mother and father living farther apart and
hugging like kids when they meet.  Her life's
opened, she reflects at this window, the mirror,
mirror, mirror, mirror echoing inward.

Black Wax Crayon
That cherry tree divided
the light at my window—
blacker than other trees
black as the trunks
I colored on the gray
rough paper at school,
smelling of something
sharp in its beginning
or middle, paper that
slipped and curled
as the black bark
curled and slipped
off the cherry tree.

At dusk sometime,
as if I read backward
into years before
my blue room was
framed, I stared into
fading light between
black limbs, past
mother's tight face and
the empty place where
daddy would sit, so tired,
home from work, way
past my bedtime, back at
the time before first grade
before wax colors and
long waxed hallways
seemed endless.  I was
the stick girl drawing
myself on paper light

and gray as the lines
of lichen drawing
their lives along the black
bark.  Under legged
and flaking yellow suns,
under the cherry tree's
black, black branches,
drawn in hard pressed
lines, we waved our
spidery hands, stopped
in angled poses, never
enough room in anyone's
circle faces to put the shapes
of all I felt when I drew us.

Lookalike Shopping
A week and a day after you died, I'm thinking
of the dozen coats you left behind, and I'm
fit to be tied--angry at the daughter
who's lost her last two jackets and taken
mine.  I want my own spring
coat and the knack for hanging onto it.

You are gone, your coats three hundred
miles away, and the department store offers
its overabundance as if to fill the void,
but there's no one around.  It's just me
and you – and the white jacket sticking
out in a thicket on the rack.  London Fog,

just like the one you wore that last year
at the beach.  I reach for it.  "Mother loved
this one," I say to no one in particular.  I steel
myself against repeating her past, mine. "Don't do it.
Remember how you bought the blue Buick
just like hers before you'd realized it?"  I slip it
on.

It slides up my arms, silken inside, holds me
like a cartoon magic fit.  It looks good on me,
of course.  I look like you – at least that's all
I've heard since I was born: "You're your mother
made over!"  Made over?  A shoddy replica?
A "before and after"?  Am I still her mirror?

One time in a store a woman rushed up to me,
pinned me with her eyes and screeched,
"You look just like Bette Davis!"
I was twenty-four.  Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane fresh on my mind.  I'd never seen
Dark Victory and felt the weight of this slight

resemblance like a blight – some future ruin
hidden in the plane of my cheek, too-round eyes.
Helpless then I know exactly what I want now
and it's the white coat.  All the way home
it strokes me . . . . I mean, I stroke it, finding
an unexpected softness.  First thing at home

my youngest daughter says, "Mom you look
great."  Everyone says she looks just like me.