Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session our text was the poem I Will Be My Mother’s Apprentice by Carmen Giménez Smith, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about being the remedy or the anchor.”

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Please join us for our next session Monday July 12th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

I WILL BE MY MOTHER’S APPRENTICE

as if I were a hunger because
it is our bleak and common future
to reverse the sphinx. I study the meander
of her logic for context. Sometimes it is
like a poem that is not quite realized
filled with hollows and bursts,
a stranger’s grief and rage. She asks
for home when she’s home. She screams
for the purse we haven’t hidden from her.
Sometimes we circle the same spots,
and I try to be as I know she was with me
once: remedy and anchor. I’m a fair
to poor replica, yet still her proxy.

That you didn’t know her is your
misfortune: a hot planet’s core,
late summer’s best light. As metaphor
I evoke a pink, vulnerable jelly,
translucent and containing the past.
I hold it in my hand and against a lamp.
This is our intimacy now. My nails trace
the brown spots that mark her losses.
Beautiful and sad and strange, I say,
because I’ve made her into something else.

“I Will Be My Mother’s Apprentice,” from Be Recorder. 
Copyright © 2019 by Carmen Giménez Smith