The Invisible Mother

Alex Fabrizio

This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding,
often under a spread, held her baby tightly for the photographer
to ensure a sharply focused image.

I’m awake—not by choice. On television,
someone’s skin rises with tiny hairs,
shushes against white sheets. Lovely artifice:
unwinding of desire. On my side of the bed,

I think of hidden mothers, faces buried
beneath quilts, rising like patterned mountains:
Wedding Knot, Star of Many Points.
Their hands made velvet cups from drapes

and held limbs still. Still.
My pale stomach trembles with my pulse.
I feel them both: the child’s grimace, elbow
caught in an unseen hold, the mother’s greed

and grief. It’s wrong, I think, to think of sex.
My face buried in the pillow—strange, how love
erases you. I’ve learned that envy means
to want what you don’t have. Jealousy

means holding on to what you do, the way
a cool window opens out to colder night
and keeps the heat inside. All those mothers,
curtained, faceless, in love. Nights in this bed,

his jeans marking a soft red pattern on my hip.
The pins-and-needles love, the unlikely pain
of blood’s return. I know her grip and fear,
her own hands hurting her flesh-of-flesh,

the silver nitrate fixing invisibly
as she sits beneath the quilt, holding her child.
How terribly love fixes to stillness: how it makes
the death it fears, how it drives the pull away.

 

Alex Fabrizio lives in New York, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She received her MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. Her chapbook Determinant will be published by Kent State University Press in 2014.

 

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