Sestina, as my mother cooks
by Lory Bedikian
I tell her it’s a problem of the nerve.
She doesn’t look up, but eases a scar
on each small olive, making room
for the marinade to soak in. Not one eye
blinks as she does this. Like before, I’m pretty
sure that this is my cue to leave.
But I think back, when she had to leave
Aleppo with my father, each good-bye plucking a nerve,
hitting notes against her chest—quite pretty
for a plainly dressed Protestant. Like a scar
they mark the bible with this date. One eye
on the future, they fly and find a one-room
apartment in New York. Now, my mother acts as if this room
holds only her. She mumbles there’s nothing wrong, just leave
the past alone and you’ll be fine. I lunge my twitching eye
toward her. But she doesn’t have the nerve
to look. I wonder how she handles the brush of scar
below her abdomen, where I entered the world, pretty
different than most. She asks me to put on something pretty
for once. The L.A. noon heat rises. I pace the room
thinking of how to tell this woman of the scar
tissue the doctor found; how I tried to leave
the office smiling, grateful it wasn’t worse, just a nerve
disorder, its radar placed in the sphere of an eye.
After so many years, she still gives me the eye
over. What I say next is anything but pretty:
Has she ever thought each cell, each nerve
of my body is conspiring in rebellion to the room
we’ve always held between us? She says she must leave
for work, she’s late. My fingers shake. I say another scar
will form from this—like each scar
you brought across the Atlantic. I feel as small as the eye
of a needle. A cutting board, an empty sink is what we leave
behind us. She walks ahead, down the hall. I stop. Pretty
soon she’ll reappear. In this house I have no room
left, so I grab my keys, knowing it’s enough that I’ve struck this nerve.
This is how she survives, making sure to leave the house looking pretty.
Not one scar visible to the eye. She doesn’t question this world, how it has
the nerve to move us from room to room, so far from where we started.
Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Her work was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books, 2015) and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Her newer work has been published in Miramar and she has poems forthcoming in Tin House.
"Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" is the second annual offering of the Poetry Coalition -- more than twenty organizations nationwide dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. A founder member of the Coalition, Letras Latinas at Notre Dame's Institute's for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present 10 poems by women in March that engage with this year's theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's "Flores Woman." The poems in this project were curated by Emma Trelles.
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