The Ties That Bind

Our relationships with family members are often crucial to who we are, for better or worse, and the poems in our May issue explore two sides of that dynamic. In “Boxer’s Fracture,” by Jackleen Holton, a mother’s death brings up strong emotions from the speaker’s painful childhood. In Meghan Daniels’s “Separation” the stresses and challenges of parenting, while exhausting, also form a solid center in the speaker’s life during an uncertain time. You can listen to the authors read their poems by clicking the play buttons below.

Take care and read well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

Boxer’s Fracture
By Jackleen Holton

I’d never broken a bone, 
I tell the X-ray tech, 
until a few days ago. 

The bright-red tomato 
dangled from a vine
where the garden fell sharply

into the gorge, and so did I,
bypassing the stairs my husband
had built for the very purpose

of not tumbling ass over 
tits down the slope. It was stupid,
I tell the doctor, the nurse

who fits my hand for the brace.
My husband, however, loves me
all the more for the fracture.

He once busted that very knuckle
years ago in a pub, against a ruddy
face that wasn’t going to shut itself.

Now I’m in the same wounded club.
By far the most common cause
of a boxer’s fracture is punching a wall.

Can you imagine the sheer asininity?
My mother once put her fist 
through drywall, nothing fractured 

but that already-broken home, 
a little more of her spirit and ours.
We can’t have nice things,

she screamed another time, proving 
her point by hurling glassware
onto the bloodied floor.

My therapist says she is astonished
that I have never done drugs, 
never even cut myself.

We turned out OK, I said 
to my brother a few months back,
before Mom got herself 

kicked out of her care home 
and put in the psych ward, before 
she had to go to the other place,

the one she hated, the one
where she took her last breath a week ago.
Tonight, on the phone again

with my brother, my husband holding
my good hand, I say nothing
about the fracture, spare him

my fable: the garden,
the red fruit, the fall.
Yesterday I told my therapist

I’m only astonished I made it
this far before I plowed
my fist into a fucking wall.

Separation
By Meghan Daniels

There is a dead snake on the cracked road. My son says it’s not a dead snake. He says the snake has just shed its skin and left it there. I say OK because I can’t manage a fight, but I can see the snake’s flat eyes, its tire-smushed flesh, corporeal. This morning I wake early to a triumphant sunrise between the trees and pour out yesterday’s coffee while surveying the detritus of the evening before. Lights still on, front door unlocked, I fell asleep coiled with my children, who are now padding down the stairs. I grab an apple from the fridge, the door broken from when their father slammed it (you have to fit the two sides together like Legos). I slice the apple, half for their breakfast, half sprinkled with lemon for their lunch; I allow myself a single piece. My son forgets to grab his backpack as he heads for the bus (is it forgetting if he never remembers?), and I hoist it on my own shoulder because I can’t manage a fight. Outside, the oversize garden, blanketed with leaves, wraps around the house like a noose. What will I be without my children? My daughter is afraid of heart attacks, but she’s more afraid of crying at school. As a girl I stood bare shouldered in a cold lobby as my mother signed a deposit slip and handed it to the teller, and I felt the crush of adulthood encroaching. In the absence of a teacher to show me how to be, I look to the tree outside my bedroom window, the one that drops its leaves upon my garden, and I think how its thin, knotted branches, forking from one commanding trunk, manage to survive the winter winds. I look to the cherry blossoms that endure fifty-one weeks of being forgotten, and to the daffodils, a few blinks ago bulbs in their underground clutches, waiting, and now, newly sprung, still waiting.