Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Fourth Wall Arpeggio” by A. Van Jordan, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about love’s austere and lonely offices.”

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

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Please join us for our next session Friday November 17th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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 "Fourth Wall Arpeggio" by A. Van Jordan

Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so

out of character for me, but it’s not about my mother,
as much as it’s about how, as a son, the disease
measures the changing rituals of family.
And 28 lines—all I’ve provided myself—seems so
anemic. Now, I barely have 18 lines left for a love

I don’t have the vigor to describe. Reticence is a disease
I’ve suffered from throughout my life. Without family,
I don’t know what it means to live as myself, and, so,
I hide in the reflection of others, which, after all, others love:
people care more about themselves than a friend’s mother.

I mean, how does one explain to someone who’s not family
how you now see the patterns into which a parent would sew
a quilt to lay over a child, the child neither hip to love
nor Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices”? My mother’s
silence seems like indifference except I know the disease,

which changes our relationship, the parent and child; I sow
healing from my memory of how she taught me to love,
not knowing her movement through a day as a mother,
as someone whose sole gig was to keep me alive, free of disease
and, whenever possible, embarrassment. But now, family

means playing the parent; I’m still just a son, writing about love,
but, lowering my eyes from the trauma, I lift her body, her disease,
for a shower, straining under all the love she sowed.

Source: Poetry (November 2023)