Photo by Gus Ruballo on Unsplash
“They just use your mind and they never
give you credit/ It's enough to drive you
crazy if you let it”
-Dolly Parton, “9 to 5”
My children wake at seven like a tumble
dry of sheets & towels. I’m tangled outta
my dreams, which snarl with their bed-
headed craze & down the hall. Body &
mind dragged, twisted beyond the singular I.
It isn’t like a mother to stumble. I must stumble
straighter, my Mom would say. Quickly to
the school drop-off, nubby nails strumming the
wheel. Grinding & releasing teeth like kitchen
drawers, their constant roll. Now children, pour
out of care, into another’s. I am hardly myself
without them, still filing homework, voices in a
hollow can. At home, my hand-washed bras cup
over a metal doorknob, hang, cradle a saying of
my mom’s: the step’s a staircase without ambition.
Yet it’s treacherous, full-mountain, when lying. &
I’m home, lying that I need my inner skull. The yawn
of windowed eyes a slow black beckoning &
before I know it I’m inside & tackling the stretch
between door & filthy. Unmaintained living room &
all the rest I don’t have time to poet out, don’t try.
I’m a countdown, each letter of myself turning to
reset my name before the family all come
home to dinner served—all devouring. This end to
a day I’ll one day call life, as in suck it up—it’s just life.
Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gone Lawn, Juked, Midway Journal, The Museum of Americana, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Sleet Magazine, and Zone 3, among other journals. She currently serves as an Assistant Prose Poetry Editor for Pithead Chapel and is the author of the microchapbook That Which Sunlight Chases (Origami Poems Project) and the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).