I am not Persephone,

                                                            by KateLynnHibbard

nor Demeter, though grief has taken me underground. Isn't every poet allowed to write at least one dead mother poem? Or one hundred? How many years before they stop coming? Your mother never stops being your mother. If you're lucky, at some point your mother will become a person in addition to being the myth that is your mother. If you're lucky, at some point your failed garden failed relationship failed metaphor will stop being your mother. I never stop thanking her. I never stop blaming her. I never stop marveling at the echoes of my mother grief. I never stop noticing I am now the age she was when she. When she lost my father, when she moved to the city, when she became a great-grandmother. When she stopped cooking. When she stopped walking. When she stopped. I never stop atoning for my sins. I never stop wishing I had been kinder, forgiven more, as I grow older and stand accused of the same things. Of not making logical sense. Of being obsessed with small details, how long until the milk expires, the names of particular trees. Of giving too much, yet somehow giving too little.

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KateLynn Hibbard’s books are Sleeping Upside Down, Sweet Weight, and Simples, winner of the 2018 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. Some journals where her poems have appeared include Barrow Street, Ars Medica, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Editor of When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience, she teaches at Minneapolis College, sings with One Voice Mixed Chorus, and lives with many pets and her spouse Jan in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Please visit katelynnhibbard.com for more information.