Kathryn Gilmore

 
The Folktale Ends and the Forest Does Not Sing to Us

Sisters, I want to tell you that we are safe here,
but the quiet does not feel to me like an absence
of sound so much as a pillow muffling a scream.

Father sleeps in the center of the house by the window.
He sleeps and wakes only to look outside, and what I
     see
in him could be longing or dread. I cannot stand the
     way
his eyes fix to the trees. I cannot stand his fear
almost as much as I cannot stand his smell.

The sweat on his yellow skin gleams
like sap. When he looks out at the forest,                      
I worry it looks back.

Once, we must have played here—
chased each other beneath the fevered light.
Well, it has been so long. I am no longer sure
of the fact of memory or wish.

Nights, when we eat by the fire,
the hearth casts your outlines onto the wall.
So much taller, those shadows.

Sisters, I am afraid.

Outside our house, a stream carves a wound into the
     yard,
and beyond, more trees, only trees, ancient and lofty
     as gods,
and like anything divine, they do not answer me.

My Step-Mother Denies Apology

I was eighteen
when my skull hit the rocks
somewhere in the Alps, my limbs
tangled with the mountain bike
for hours before they found me.

It would shock you
how the body folds like paper
upon impact.

I called my mother
back in New York, told her,
There was an accident,
heard, You woke me up for this?

So I learned motherhood
easily transforms into burden;
care can be exchanged for control.

You understand: you are not the first
for whom flinching is innate
as breathing.

Understand that the wincing is a sign of life.

Let me put this another way.

When you begin to think of me
unkindly, consider the lioness
who eats her cubs
after deeming herself an unfit mother.

Wouldn’t you rather violent mercy
over suffering?

Kathryn Gilmore is pursuing her MFA at Syracuse University, where she is poetry editor of Salt Hill Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barnstorm Journal, The Comstock Review, Gulf Coast Journal, The Madison Review, among others. She is originally from Memphis, Tennessee.

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