The Mother, The Father
/Francine Witte
The Mother
In the history of you, your mother
was belly blossom and then the
primordial soup you crawled out of.
Your limbs stretched tadpole-like
as you finally touched solid ground.
Your mother held her breath as you grew
and walked away towards too much sugar
or a bullet’s possible path. Some nights,
she would wish you back into her womb
where she could feel you kick, or remember
how later, once born, she could hold you,
your milk breath sweet in the nursery air.
But now, as you borrow her perfume,
spray it on your first-date neck, she tells
you how the species will do anything
to survive, her actual words being, boys
will say a lot of things to get you into bed,
and you wonder If she could mean Daniel,
from Math class, Spock salute and tooth gap,
who you only agreed to go out with because
all your friends say you’re too picky. Daniel
who is right now pulling up in front of your
house in his father’s car, and he better have
it back by ten. Later, the two of you in the last
row of the Cinema 5, popcorn bucket down
to its buttery bottom, Daniel wiping his hand
on the velvety seat and reaching for yours,
like something crawling out of the sea.,
The Father
In the history of you, your father
was the bullet that joined splat with
your mother’s egg that night they lay
together and him rolling off of her,
his belly heaving up and down, her fingers
trailing the hairs on his chest. Later, you
show up, the whole new country that you
are, and he has to learn your mysterious
language, learn the exact line where you
both divide. Now, he drives you to your
first dance, where you will end up dancing
with Mike from bio, detention hall and fake
I.D. who is only trying to get Jeannie Peters
jealous. Mike, who will kiss you, take your
number and never call. Your father is too aware
of the things boys will say, remembers his own
teen-aged nights, grass-stained jeans, bottles
of Mateus. And now, he sits in the car and
watches you swallowed into the crush of sports
jackets and gelled-up hair. He taps his fingers
on the steering wheel until you are safe even
though he knows you’ll never be safe again.
Instead, you will go from being a country to
being a whole new planet among the strips of
crepe paper and swollen balloons. And he drives
home for a couple of hours until he comes back
to pick you up, knowing that everything, even
you, only lives in the moving away.
Author’s Note: I wrote this poem in two parts. I wanted to show the different perspectives of the two parents and how they react to the daughter growing up. I'm not a parent myself, so I actually identify more with the daughter in both parts, but I tried to think of how my parents probably felt.
Francine Witte’s poetry collections include Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) and Some Distant Pin of Light (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, 2023,) as well as chapbooks Not All Fires Burn the Same (2016 first prize winner, Slipstream,) and First Rain (Pecan Grove Press.) She is also a flash fiction writer. She lives in NYC.
