After the Strokes, My Aphasiac Mother Tells of Another Fun-Filled Vacation She Had with Her Children in a Journal for My Children
[a broken rondeau w/commentary]
We drove to get apples for the children, she says, to pleasures, to get fruit stands. We were poor she says, & I recall we were poor & the migrant houses we drove by every Sunday on our way to church, small and white among the orchards and the fruit stands and the pickers out picking & I asked my mother what they were, and she told me what they were. Trucks full of baskets of apples along the rows of trees that they picked from—the men & women, children playing in dirt. We loaded our bags with crayons and games for church each Sunday, with games and clothes and a sleeping bag each summer to head north for vacation. We didn’t have much but had cars for gas to ride across the Mighty Mac, our bellies groaning in the car with gum & books & hunger. And the gas and the car took my mother from camp on steep hill where it was dark to sleep & in a river was steep to the fruit stand down the road, my mother explains, and we [my parents] drove to get apples for the children in their tent with small plastic toys and flashlights and books. And gum to chew to stave off hunger, every cent spent on the campsite and $3.25 to cross Mighty Mac, and the cheeseburger my father bought because he was hungry, my mother saying Jon, the children are hungry pulling out the money she saved for a vacation—always to spend on her children. The fruit stand we passed down the road, open late, so she wants to go there with my father. My mother to pleasures, to get fruit stands up a far & far climb to the campsite from the fruit stand, says she, Jon & me. In the dark, we drove to get apples I read in her journal, her hands clutching coins she had saved [I remember] and my father complaining she didn’t tell him she had money to buy a few apples, to make a vacation. My brother & sisters & I in a tent, plastic toys, and starry nights—a fantasy for the children, to pleasures, to get fruit stands. The migrant mothers back home doing the same among rows of trees with apples. Quarters for plastic toys & starry nights in white houses with very small windows & a very small breeze—anything for the children, to pleasures, to get fruit stands. Trucks full of baskets, long bumpy rides, and the children waving at men who are picking apples. We were poor, my mother explains to her children and children’s children, had cars for gas to ride.
Thank You for the Apples,
for Octavio Quintanilla
for the summer moon,
for the storm
that sliced a tree in two
down the road
from my childhood home
where white Jesus hung over
my bed and prayed
for us—for you, poet,
& your mother
in another country, my yard
puddled to perfection
for play the next day
& the sun that would warm
our Michigan habitat
baptizing air
in humidified heat drawn up
from each liquid
pool. Along
the rows of white houses
children prepare
to carry something; maybe
only their souls
& hunger. This
is all we approve before we learn
that God
is particular about
his gender &
the color of his face. I prayed
for all the migrant workers
in the houses—for you,
poet, in one
of the little white houses—
not too far away
from my home
where summer moon
peered through clouds
at you (tired of apples)
& me, grateful
for the apple
I ate waiting for rain
to stop while sitting on
my bed looking up
at white Jesus
in sorrowful meditation. He knew
about your mother, I think,
and maybe my mother
too. Both
of them praying
to their respective Jesus
for us.
KIMBERLY ANN PRIEST is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, as well as the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications) with books forthcoming from Texas Review Press and Unsolicited Press. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives, with her husband, in Maine.
Midwest Review 