Mother Died on a Tuesday

Alexander J. Theoharides

Mother named her Anne with an E after Anne of Green Gables. She told Anne the stories of kindred spirits, raspberry cordial, and handsome Gil as they picnicked beneath the shade of their favorite linden tree. When they walked through the long prairie grass, Mother whispered the names of the flowers—wild columbine, lady’s slippers, Jack-in-the-pulpit. Up North, at their cabin in the woods, Mother dropped her into the cold glacial water and watched Anne thrash beneath the surface. Swim, my darling, she murmured. Swim.

When Anne grew up, Mother grew stern. She worried all the time. Wrinkles crowded her forehead and wove spider webs from the corners of her mouth. She cried at night and in the morning she set a rigid jaw. Finish your meal, she scolded Anne. You can do so much better than this. You’re too thin.

A year later, when Anne went to the University, Mother did not say goodbye. She watched Anne pack her things into her Volvo station wagon. She watched Anne drive down and then pause at the end of their long driveway. She closed her eyes and thought Gil would be a nice name for Anne’s first love. She closed her eyes and imagined Anne’s return at Thanksgiving: The table set neatly. A turkey roasting in the oven. Potatoes on the stovetop. Anne sitting across the table pretending she knew how to drink her first glass of wine. When Mother opened her eyes, Anne’s car was gone.

Mother died on a Tuesday morning in February. She was fifty-eight years old. Anne was not yet thirty. Mother died and when Anne asked how, the doctor said it was painless. She closed her eyes, he said. Then she smiled and passed away. Anne thanked the doctor—she understood quite well the reason for his lies. Mother died and it was awful. Chemotherapy took her hair, radiation took the muscles in her right arm and surgery took her womanhood. Mother died and it didn’t matter. Her mother was not the old woman with spider-web wrinkles, ashen skin and tufts of gray hair. Mother died and Anne smiled because she knew it was a horrible joke gone awry. Anne closed her eyes and Mother still walked through the prairie grass whispering the names of all the flowers; she still told the story of Anne of Green Gables beneath the shade of their favorite linden tree; she still stood on their dock staring through the water as Anne tried to swim.

De Giving Catur Thanks

-Aaron Blum

In the silence of the mornings with Puerto Rican
coffee on the stove, while the dreams
still linger dully, white carpet
between your toes, all the early conversations,
over lox and over bagels,
when you're waiting for the toaster,
by the bubbling water bottle.

While you're yet to be a son,
just the words between tongues
and a bridge, ephemeral, hanging there
all suspended and what should walk across
and what runs underneath
but the blood of generations,
of the daughters left of Israel
of the sons just right of Christ
of the prisoners of the mind
of the wisdom of the weather
all dried up and overflowing,

one being one being one being,

then the music of the strings coming fast
now from upstairs. And the laughter
as the years grow, shorter
as the kids grow, older
and the kids grow, older
as the parents start to work
and then there's change. There's always
can't stop moving
from plane to car to house to stage,
and who's performing? a slice
of deep dish personality pizza.

In the jibber jabber evenings
on the couch with bellies full,
playing songs about New Orleans
in a room packed to the brim.
With fire on the tongues
and the night is in the window
with the wind outside a-whisperin
something cold.

(Refrain)

You drive me crazy
and I'll drive you sane
and we'll both smoke cigarettes
out in the backyard with the deer
and the brown and golden leaves
and a Springsteen song playing
for the history is too long

to be passed down in the food
shoveled with the snow
raked with the leaves
spun on a record
sang by stevie wonder
played with a pawn
typed on a keyboard
dealt with the cards
bought and sold and lived in
told in a joke
cured like cancer
graduated from school
sued in court
talked into the air
given like kidneys
read in a book
eaten in chocolate
eaten in turkey
fought in a war
ran through the streets
died with a Rose
Sewn into suits
meditated on
blessed into spirits
prayed to death
missed for a year
and still stand like a temple
in the Midwest.

Thisbe and Olivia on Orchard Street [1]

This is the start of a very long poem.

I. Thisbe in Mrs. Faber’s First Grade Class

The felt bleeds, I know I can see it. Inky fingerprints. It must hurt the markers! For me to color, they give what Crayola gave them.

But the factory made each marker for a purpose. So one must feel good when I use it, the friction drawing out juice. And it must like my picture—

the wetting and digging and pulling of paper fibers, ink mixing with ink to make the red-orange of Kelly Ridd’s hair.

While sitting in my desk, does a marker ache for use? I should use them all the time! But they expire! And to expire is to die—so they must be in pain. So it is one or the other.

I wish I could just ask them.

I bet I could color my hair the color of Kelly Ridd’s hair.

My desk smells like wet saltines. I could to better at keeping it clean.

I. Olive on the Way Home from the Coffee Shop

I got robbed!

The kind where the asshole confused me behind the till. Twenty for a dollar, three tens for a twenty and a five and five dollars, five for five and ten dollars, no could I have three tens if I give you ten and five dollars. Then it’s a bouquet of paper that smells like salt and later my drawer is twenty short.

The shop is slowly folding. Now I am twenty short. I was already short.

This morning I got two shots in two arms. That was dumb. Idiotic symmetry. Two sets of clumpy muscles. And I lost the quarter inch I grew last summer.

I’ll still tell people I’m five five.

I don’t mean to sound defeated. But now my driver’s license is mostly a lie and I just lost twenty dollars.

Kelin Loe

Untitled

checked out like a bad criminal left

fingerprints all over your heart.

wasted nights in the mountains,

bloody shadows, whiskey tongue

and watching the sunrise as history

fell apart over a thousand years.

there is no one left to talk to but the sun

rises everywhere, the world is bigger than us

and we only have two hands to wind

the broken clocks and watch.

 

from the dust on your heels to the tequila

bottles of piss, to the strange face

shaking in the mirror

stubbled memories into the sink

from a rusted razor.

because love is an effort to change war

into something human.

because a hundred smiles can't fit

into one of your winks.

because the belly of the moon

has a haggard stomach.

 

the caves north of Madrid harbor this

that I have left of the sunset we saw

from that bridge when

our lives played the black keys

on a dancing Saturday night

with a Spanish tongue.

-Aaron Blum 

Finally, Today I Felt Happy

There is a stone water tower
in southern Minneapolis
with knights stationed all around.
We climbed the hill and stood
beneath gargantuan swords.
An old, blackened oak there
thinks it is Halloween, so we
picked its acorns and tossed them
like eggs.

A breeze came through my hands
that felt like running water.
I closed my eyes and felt the grass
breathing beneath my feet.
When I run, I turn into a deer
and bound endlessly between the rocks.

- Dan Olmschenk

My Friend

Drives home in September after a day spent working a job that makes her feel like an asshole.

She parks her car in a space that costs two quarters an hour and sits on a bench that faces out toward Lake Harriet.

A couple she recognizes jogs by, with their golden retriever racing out in front of them, but she does not say hello.

Instead she watches a Swedish flag, which should be blowing in the wind, but instead hangs limply from the mast of a docked sailboat named Delusions of Grandeur. 

A small fish, which she can’t identify because she doesn’t know anything about fish, swims past the bow of the sailboat, without disturbing the milfoil that creeps up to the surface of the water.

It’s coming for me, my friend imagines. She pretends for a moment to talk to the fish.

She puckers her cheeks and says, but not aloud for that would be queer, Keep away fish, this is my bench, no one can sit here but me. 

- Alexander J. Theoharides

Fast-Forward

There is a jar holding
the bare brains
of singing fools
each jarring night
standing moon
wears the mask of
nothingness common
of clearing the sky
sinning with stars

The godless wonders
wander like drunken
dragon warriors
through Payless Shoes
strangers to boots
undergarments
and far far away
water runs like wine
whispers through
southbound winds

Underestimated where
and how far and caring
and wearing like wet
leather stretching to
breaking and tears
born out of sounding
ripping material
like boiling water
in fast-forward.

-Daniel Olmschenk

Come Away With Me

Come Away With Me

She whispers, her thin lips barely touching my own.
Above us the sun radiates the way my father’s father always said it would—
around the corners and over the bends of too few clouds.
My eyes can only take so much.

I close them and try to answer all the questions ever asked.Ten angels can pass through the eye of a needle.
We are the descendents of promiscuous dust mites.
There is life on other planets—but none worth looking for.
I open my eyes; she is there again.

Come away with me,
she says once more, her eyes meeting mine,
mumbling words her lips can’t form.
What’s the over/under? I ask.
She shakes her head and I look away.

Across the street from where I lie,
mosquitoes swarm, but they are men
in search of nectar and wish me no harm.
A boy sits, his back resting against an ash.
Is this heaven? he asks in a voice like a thousand muted drums.

I’m not sure, I tell him.
He stares at me, his left hand cupped to his left ear,
watching my serpentine words try to cross the street
and pass through the blanket of mosquitoes that surrounds him.
I’m not sure, I say again.

A solitary mosquito separates from the pack
and floats toward me reaching her six arms out to still my lips.
Come, she whispers, as she thrusts her proboscis deep into my skin 

and flaps her angelic wings.
Come away with me.


-Alexander J. Theoharides

Who we are

The Clouded Water Writers is a regional publication focused on promoting Twin Cities' writers.