Jackleen Holton

Writing Home

 

My mother died, and I’m driving

across the desert again, that stretch

where the shrub-brush and yucca blur,

Saguaros flare as we close in on the city,

and the deejay on 96 Rock, through thick static,

calls my hometown The Old Pueblo

again as if it’s nineteen-eighty-something,

and like it’s nineteen-eighty-something,

the mournful strains of Journey fade

into the pumping pistons of ZZ Top,

and I’m driving home again

because my mother’s dead.

 

But no, that can’t be right.

I’m only writing the drive, these Saguaros

penciled in, the cacti not the light green

of my mother’s eyes when she was younger,

but charcoal gray like the ash

that she is now, like these words I write

to tell you that my mother’s in a red urn

on a table in a church. I stand to say a few words.

My brother sobs into his clenched fist. But I won’t cry

until the night inks my hotel window black

and the blood orange moon rises from the cleft

between two mountains like a flaming bowl.

I Don’t Remember the Time She Locked Me in the Bathroom

 

of the tiny cottage on Old Nogales Highway,

an incident she told me had been troubling

her for years. It happened just after 

the move to Arizona, the year after my father 

overdosed. Or took his own life. 

And she was left alone 

with a toddler and a baby.

She had been meaning to say so 

for a while. Her voice cracked, 

or maybe it was the connection.

But now that I had a daughter

who looked like the girl in that memory, 

she wanted to apologize 

for this incident, perhaps the only one 

I don’t remember, though I do recall 

a few scraps from that cottage: a fire 

on the gas range, the way she gleefully 

called me in from what was both living room 

and bedroom to witness the witchy fingers 

of flame reaching from the burner 

toward the ceiling as she laughed. 

I remember how I screamed then, 

the way I must have screamed 

from that barricaded bathroom. 

She wanted to absolve herself of this, 

and the forgiveness came easy 

that night, thanks to time and therapy, 

thanks to all I have since learned 

of her illness, all she had to carry.

And thanks to the wonder of us all 

somehow being alive that night: 

her, me, my baby brother, 

and the granddaughter who arrived

as dramatically as an unexpected blaze,

a child who reminds me more of her

than myself. No, I won’t dwell 

on what she couldn’t allow 

herself to remember. The fire 

went down when she switched off the gas,

handily dispatched a heavy gray blanket 

to smother the rest of the flames.

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies "The Giant Book of Poetry", "California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology", and "Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life". Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun and others.