Victorian Violet Press
Mother & Child
1.
A matter of geometry, these two:
mother and son bisecting desire,
trilling between syllables of miracle
on the insatiate tip of God's tongue,
plotting points of spirit-cum-body-cumsolitude
across the palate of this
Cartesian life.
Like Euclid pictured
space, cropped it tight, then pinned it
to his wall. Dressed the plane's blank stare
with theorems intersecting as bodies
at birth, flesh strung on strands
of one-point-six-one-eight: golden ratio
flung, lasso-like, from Gabriel's tongue
around Mary's vestal flame. Around
Elizabeth's reproach:
a woman
kneeling bedside, telling tissues
wrung dry as a rosary run out of beads.
As her uterus chapped like a mid-drought
riverbed: no rain to replenish
the abyss. No rain to bed dust stirred
by mourning doves’ grief. No rain to
tune her divining rod to God’s promises.
2. After the in vitro
fell through, she laughed with Sarah,
patron saint of laughing at God’s vows,
through deprivation’s bearing down.
Birthed one grand guffaw as Sarah
brushed hope like dust from
a ninety-year womb, strung motes
of desire on golden strands, then
willed her the rosary. Suggested
she hold tight the umbilical, telling
its folds until God gave in, said He’d
trade her maternity for that altar of a laugh
she'd knelt at ten years, stained month
after month with grief’s insatiate memory.
3.
The morning she rang with her adoption news—
late-teenage birth-mother, boy due in a month,
and her: without crib, clothes, blankets;
her guestroom of a nursery barely
broken in beyond a few days’ hospitality—
the annunciation half-raptured, halfstalled
through the line. As if she
thought the angel divining her son
from that womb of a crystal ball
would say, “He’s yours,” fingers crossed
behind the vow.
Not that I blame
her hesitation: Subtract seven years from
that minor denouement and you've got
the elegy she hyphenated upon hearing
we were pregnant: "That-makes-me-so-mad."
Meaning, "Cruel logic, this: sibling mathematics.
Three years I've squared flesh
by my husband's flesh. Primed numbers
with an actuary’s acumen. And
all I get? Endometriosis divided by
infertility’s stigma in the State
of 'So, How Many Kids?' While they
slipped out of contraception a month
and, voilà, fruit the size of my desire.
God? That-makes-me-so-mad."
I never told her I heard her post-benediction
more-petition-than-expletive. Never
confessed that her brooding slipped
through as she turned from my call
to refuge in wrath equals grief equals
me, holding the dial-tone seven years.
Counting the absence beneath her words
like abacus beads. Keeping track
of the meter until she could shape
her next line around, "He's mine."
Breath compressed, released, caressed
across the palate to relief:
Zackary.
Zackary. Name moist enough to tame
the cowlick thick, like hers,
across his pate. Enough to swaddle him
to sleep the first night—and the second,
third, fourth, fifth—he cozied into the hollow
worn beneath her breast by infertility’s slow
drip (gnawing constant as incontinent pipes
up ten years with the pinch) and slept. Slipped
in and out of infancy while she traced his
fingers tight as rosary beads across
his palm, Amen-ed, counted again. More
slowly then, as she timed her body to his:
his rise, fall, rise against her slight repose.
As she mapped his subtle topography
into the golden bloom of dawn.
Reaching for the Hem
Pressed against shadow by the pulsing throng,
her back to twelve years’ eternity,
a crimson emptiness draped around her
like a womb, a hollow in God’s universe
shorn by the gauzy pool of her flesh, she
unfolds from her yoke, stretching
through the crowd to sear her wounds
with the Physician’s styptic hem.
His smoldering tassels in hand, her blood
burning white with apocalypse,
she sheds her ashen drape
over the crimson sea of his words
and, flesh lanugo blonde, crests their flame
into the velvet folds of dawn.
Landscape with Figures
I’m sure this is how
they’d want to be remembered—
pansies (some salmon, some pink with white tips),
geraniums, tulips, alyssum to their right and left;
a patch of daisies just behind; a small grove of aspen
farther back, by the property line, trunks skirted by juniper,
leaves early summer green. Yet, as I work to fix them
within this vessel of word and memory, their graying bodies
blur into gardens wrenched out of Eden’s clarity:
Cursed is the ground, God had said; and they’d blessed it
with breath and sweat and with callused hands and
fingers ingrained with the years of soil they’d
layered on seeds and tucked
around roots. Posed here, rib to rib
beside their bone dry oak, his shoulders
trim with reserve, arms straight, hands anchored
to his thighs; her posture loose, fresh tulips in hand,
legs poised to greet us beyond their frame: they slip
into the shadow of the oak’s once diseased branches
now swallowed in the vines he’d planted
years ago
to keep the dead tree green.
Tyler Chadwick
Originally from Utah, Tyler Chadwick moved to Idaho in 2008 to
pursue his doctorate in English & the Teaching of English at Idaho
State University. He spends his time husbanding his wife, Jessica,
fathering three (soon-to-be four) kids, teaching writing foundations
at Brigham Young University--Idaho, reading, writing, researching,
and editing---he's editorial assistant for JAC (pronounced j-a-c), an
interdisciplinary journal of rhetoric, writing, culture, and politics
housed in ISU's Department of English & Philosophy. He's also an
avid runner. His poems have been published in Metaphor, Dialogue,
Irreantum, Salome, and Black Rock & Sage.
1.
A matter of geometry, these two:
mother and son bisecting desire,
trilling between syllables of miracle
on the insatiate tip of God's tongue,
plotting points of spirit-cum-body-cumsolitude
across the palate of this
Cartesian life.
Like Euclid pictured
space, cropped it tight, then pinned it
to his wall. Dressed the plane's blank stare
with theorems intersecting as bodies
at birth, flesh strung on strands
of one-point-six-one-eight: golden ratio
flung, lasso-like, from Gabriel's tongue
around Mary's vestal flame. Around
Elizabeth's reproach:
a woman
kneeling bedside, telling tissues
wrung dry as a rosary run out of beads.
As her uterus chapped like a mid-drought
riverbed: no rain to replenish
the abyss. No rain to bed dust stirred
by mourning doves’ grief. No rain to
tune her divining rod to God’s promises.
2. After the in vitro
fell through, she laughed with Sarah,
patron saint of laughing at God’s vows,
through deprivation’s bearing down.
Birthed one grand guffaw as Sarah
brushed hope like dust from
a ninety-year womb, strung motes
of desire on golden strands, then
willed her the rosary. Suggested
she hold tight the umbilical, telling
its folds until God gave in, said He’d
trade her maternity for that altar of a laugh
she'd knelt at ten years, stained month
after month with grief’s insatiate memory.
3.
The morning she rang with her adoption news—
late-teenage birth-mother, boy due in a month,
and her: without crib, clothes, blankets;
her guestroom of a nursery barely
broken in beyond a few days’ hospitality—
the annunciation half-raptured, halfstalled
through the line. As if she
thought the angel divining her son
from that womb of a crystal ball
would say, “He’s yours,” fingers crossed
behind the vow.
Not that I blame
her hesitation: Subtract seven years from
that minor denouement and you've got
the elegy she hyphenated upon hearing
we were pregnant: "That-makes-me-so-mad."
Meaning, "Cruel logic, this: sibling mathematics.
Three years I've squared flesh
by my husband's flesh. Primed numbers
with an actuary’s acumen. And
all I get? Endometriosis divided by
infertility’s stigma in the State
of 'So, How Many Kids?' While they
slipped out of contraception a month
and, voilà, fruit the size of my desire.
God? That-makes-me-so-mad."
I never told her I heard her post-benediction
more-petition-than-expletive. Never
confessed that her brooding slipped
through as she turned from my call
to refuge in wrath equals grief equals
me, holding the dial-tone seven years.
Counting the absence beneath her words
like abacus beads. Keeping track
of the meter until she could shape
her next line around, "He's mine."
Breath compressed, released, caressed
across the palate to relief:
Zackary.
Zackary. Name moist enough to tame
the cowlick thick, like hers,
across his pate. Enough to swaddle him
to sleep the first night—and the second,
third, fourth, fifth—he cozied into the hollow
worn beneath her breast by infertility’s slow
drip (gnawing constant as incontinent pipes
up ten years with the pinch) and slept. Slipped
in and out of infancy while she traced his
fingers tight as rosary beads across
his palm, Amen-ed, counted again. More
slowly then, as she timed her body to his:
his rise, fall, rise against her slight repose.
As she mapped his subtle topography
into the golden bloom of dawn.
Reaching for the Hem
Pressed against shadow by the pulsing throng,
her back to twelve years’ eternity,
a crimson emptiness draped around her
like a womb, a hollow in God’s universe
shorn by the gauzy pool of her flesh, she
unfolds from her yoke, stretching
through the crowd to sear her wounds
with the Physician’s styptic hem.
His smoldering tassels in hand, her blood
burning white with apocalypse,
she sheds her ashen drape
over the crimson sea of his words
and, flesh lanugo blonde, crests their flame
into the velvet folds of dawn.
Landscape with Figures
I’m sure this is how
they’d want to be remembered—
pansies (some salmon, some pink with white tips),
geraniums, tulips, alyssum to their right and left;
a patch of daisies just behind; a small grove of aspen
farther back, by the property line, trunks skirted by juniper,
leaves early summer green. Yet, as I work to fix them
within this vessel of word and memory, their graying bodies
blur into gardens wrenched out of Eden’s clarity:
Cursed is the ground, God had said; and they’d blessed it
with breath and sweat and with callused hands and
fingers ingrained with the years of soil they’d
layered on seeds and tucked
around roots. Posed here, rib to rib
beside their bone dry oak, his shoulders
trim with reserve, arms straight, hands anchored
to his thighs; her posture loose, fresh tulips in hand,
legs poised to greet us beyond their frame: they slip
into the shadow of the oak’s once diseased branches
now swallowed in the vines he’d planted
years ago
to keep the dead tree green.
Tyler Chadwick
Originally from Utah, Tyler Chadwick moved to Idaho in 2008 to
pursue his doctorate in English & the Teaching of English at Idaho
State University. He spends his time husbanding his wife, Jessica,
fathering three (soon-to-be four) kids, teaching writing foundations
at Brigham Young University--Idaho, reading, writing, researching,
and editing---he's editorial assistant for JAC (pronounced j-a-c), an
interdisciplinary journal of rhetoric, writing, culture, and politics
housed in ISU's Department of English & Philosophy. He's also an
avid runner. His poems have been published in Metaphor, Dialogue,
Irreantum, Salome, and Black Rock & Sage.
