a poem by Susan Barich 2009
It’s four in the morning,
and I’ve been awake since before midnight.
When the sun comes up,
I’ll be an executive,
but here in the dark
at the kitchen table
wrapped in a blanket
by lamplight
with a steaming mug of chamomile tea,
I am a poet
and a mother who has lost a child
and I am a daughter
remembering,
thinking,
imagining,
wondering.
I am 16.
I stand next to my mother.
She is weeping as her hands
tenderly hold,
then fold,
my sister’s bra.
The regulation-issue,
good-Catholic-girl,
1966,
white-cotton-with-the-lace-overlay,
Playtex bra in a box
from J.C. Penny.
The bra we wore under our
uniform blouses in 7th and 8th grades.
The bra we wore in high school
under the soft, wool sweaters
that we washed in the bathroom sink
squeezing them gently in the cold water
with Ivory Snow Flakes
and rinsed
and folded and rolled up in a towel,
then laid on a rack to dry over night.
The bra we wore under the blouses
that we sewed on Nani’s
hand-me-down sewing machine.
The sleeveless cotton blouses with
Peter Pan collars and
buttons we sewed on
by hand.
Then my mother
gently placed my sister’s bra in the
Goodwill bag,
as carefully as if it were a
hand-blown,
tissue-thin,
glass ball
nested there amongst the other
fragile,
but now discarded,
treasures from my sister’s
underwear drawer.
And I wanted to hold her
and let her cry on my shoulder
and sob till she had no more tears –
maybe for a hundred years –
but I did not know how.
And as I sit in the kitchen and
remember that day
I think about Frida Kahlo’s painting
of herself lying bloody in the street
after having been run over by a bus,
and how broken she became
for the rest of her life.
And I imagine myself
like that.
Broken.
No longer able to function as
previously advertised.
Never again to be whole.
And I wonder
what that will be like.
