Walking with my husband and our daughters,
my aunt, eight years younger than my mother,
with her husband, and youngest daughter.
I’m behind her,
talking, laughing. Suddenly,
my aunt stops and turns. You have your mother’s
voice. For a moment she came back.
Our faces open into different stories,
then slowly close. She was
the mother I tried
not to be, dead three years. I recall her voice
most clearly in piercing words I blotted out.
An alcoholic intent on dying as our daughters
entered the world. And yet I was
shaking. Shaken.
Decades later, one of my vocal cords paralyzed
in heart surgery, I ponder again
in my renewed heart.
Her life began mine.
What will I sing now in our voice?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 1.
Veronica Patterson’s poetry collections include How to Make a Terrarium (CSU Poetry Center, 1987), Swan, What Shores? (NYU Press Poetry Prize, 2000), Thresh & Hold (Gell Poetry Prize, 2009), & it had rained (CW Books, 2013), Sudden White Fan (Cherry Grove, 2018), and two chapbooks. Poems have appeared on Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She teaches creative writing for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and was Loveland’s first Poet Laureate (2019-2022).
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