Words We Don’t Say
I am not allowed to call my husband’s son my stepson. He’s made it clear he has one mother. That’s not me. Still, we had a friendship of a sort all through those whirling high-school years. Car pools. A sudden need for an ironed shirt. The swift deletion of the contents of the fridge. At least his friends thought I was cool.
His first summer home from college, he wouldn’t speak to me. I asked his father to intervene, used words like wife and us and asked what they could mean, if I was to be so easily erased. He said he’d try, then said he didn’t know how. So I took a five-day gig away, writing an article about two learned men, their famous campus nested in fairy-tale woods. They fed me compliments and champagne, waved a swank job possibility in the air. I drove home through a soundtrack of rain and sad jazz. Somewhere between Shirley Horn and Frank Sinatra, I realized I wasn’t leaving.
Yes, things are better now. The boy became a man, and can converse with me. He’s married and has a daughter. It took ten minutes of holding her baby self in my arms for her to take ownership of some new place in my heart. But my suggestion she call me Nona met with only the old, cold silence. On the wall in my granddaughter’s family home hang photos of the named: her mother’s parents, her father’s mother, my husband. There is no word for what I am to her. She calls me Rose.
Persephone in Hillcrest Heights
After Winter
And so the raft of my heart retreats from the wake of your boat,
false friend. Oh, how you took, and lied, and fought
to make me small. Despite the odds of my own
predilections, despite every enemy’s predictions, my state
is sound. I’m well prepared for the tides. At this
first full moon of spring, raking the sand for omens, I declare myself
the guard of my own sweetness, my fierce appetites. And oh,
I can taste it, that early green promise, the tang of the new bud
breaking the air, not now, but soon, so soon.
Rose Solari is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, The Last Girl, Orpheus in the Park, and Difficult Weather; the one-act play, Looking for Guenevere, in which she also performed; and a novel, A Secret Woman. She has lectured and taught writing workshops at many institutions, including Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing; the University of Maryland, College Park; St. John’s College, Annapolis; and The Centre for Creative Writing at Oxford University in Oxford, England. In 2010, she co-founded Alan Squire Publishing, a small press with big ideas.