Tap-dancing teen, coed, teacher, bride, and mine, the one who pushed my carriage up Kings Highway, who read me “Peter Goes to School” and “I Decided.” The one to whom I confessed my first kiss, against whom I slammed the bedroom door. The one who came when my appendix burst, and she who walked me down the aisle. Brunette, frosted, auburn, blonde, gray, gone. Bobby sox, New Look, brooches on lace jackets, gone. Hazel eyes, sweet smile, long legs, flat feet, breast without and breast with the crimped seam where the lump had been released, gone. The one who cared for her husband, long gone. She who remembered every detail and she who forgot my son. And too—the one who said I love you as she lay in her final bed as I stroked her head and arm, the way she’d caressed me when I was small, as she herself had been caressed by her own mother, or had always wished to be. All of them, every one, is gone. They blew a kiss and skipped, sashayed, strode, plodded, hobbled, crept; maybe, in the end, flew—all those mothers, arm in arm, vanished out that pinewood door.
I touch my children
with their hands; I walk with their
uneven stride—
–
Marjorie Tesser’s poetry and fiction have appeared in SWWIM, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cutleaf, and others. She is author of the poetry chapbooks THE IMPORTANT THING IS (Firewheel Award Winner) and The Magic Feather, and she is co-editor of three anthologies of poetry and prose. Marjorie is Editor-in-Chief of MER – Mom Egg Review.