My mother took it all in: a junkie
with no front teeth who stole her
wedding ring; baby rabbits
from the garden my father rented
behind our neighbor’s house,
a small patch of Michigan
where the pumpkins grew unseasonably
large; balloon Jesus at the megachurch;
decaying watermelon rinds
at the Detroit Zen Center,
where she scrubbed the floors
in silence and ignored her stomach pains;
her appendix that burst on a school bus;
the mountain that ended her ballet career;
the snowsuit she was cut out of in the ambulance
and the man who left her for his wife;
the bronze deco elevator
at The Fisher where she asked patrons
if they were going up or down
and passed out orange lozenges
at intermission; the boa constrictor
that got loose in her duplex
when she was twenty-nine and the body
of the boa constrictor she found at thirty;
the chill that drove her under the awnings
of a Chinese restaurant where sheets
of meringue cooled, unlovingly, next to
the cash register—she bought them out;
my brother and her brother, the men
in my family who are always between
glass bottles and ass-less hospital gowns,
who have the same limp mouths
and puppy-dog eyes and come home
with bruises and wearing other people’s
clothing, who check themselves into motels
and sleep in Sunkist trucks;
who I have been mourning for years
already, but who continue to exist
among us like stone statues of martyrs
who were discredited centuries ago;
the secrets she taught me to have
as if passing on an heirloom;
her fur coat she never had the occasion
for; the peonies that blanketed Death Valley
the summer when she followed
my father to California
to bring him a pot of curry chicken
and ask if he would marry her
before her father passed.
He was spelunking out there—I mean it;
crawling into manhole-sized caves
and pushing his body to the point at which sun’s
neck could no longer find him. I don’t know
if she followed him into that darkness,
but I know the darkness that followed;
the trickle, the surge, and the howl
when the ceiling collapsed and I was lowered
into the shaft like a bucket in a well;
so trust me when I tell you that
there are peonies and then there are peonies.
Jane Huffman is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she is a 2016-17 teaching-writing fellow. She has published poems in West Branch, Witness, The Adroit Journal, The Common, SOFTBLOW, Word Riot, and elsewhere in print and online. She is a staff editor for Sundress Publications and Best of the Net Anthology. She lives and teaches in Iowa City, IA.