Vanita Leatherwood | 2009 Poetry Honorable Mention

Celadon Kitchen

I imagine my mother receiving funeral flowers for me

sitting in her celadon kitchen

unaware that she could just say green

unaware that she could send

the white carnations, the asters and stock,

the huge baskets of dying leaves and angel’s trumpet back.

My brother is watching from the heaven she believes in

wanting to whisper in her ear

my sister is not dead.

But she takes the flowers in.

I imagine my mother receiving funeral flowers for me sitting in her celadon kitchen.

Her earrings are heavy.

Her fawn pink nails

toast brown fingers

fiddle at the clasp.

For a moment she considers unleashing it

rubbing the swollen lobes with the smooth of her thumb.

She does not.

Someone might knock at the door.

Delphinium may arrive.

Someone might knock at the door

and ask if she is the mother

who let her daughter dance in moonbath

lean into woman love

turn away from crosses and pillars and arrows

into thicket

and moist mound.

Saying it all without saying

Lesbian.

I imagine my mother receiving funeral flowers for me sitting in her celadon kitchen

Houndstooth and revelations justifying the misery

she feels

in her daughter’s so-called defection

in her playing for the other side

in the succumbing to the seductions

of dark dumb dykes.

Certainly

she thinks

staring at a photo of me

in cap and gown

and wedding lace

certainly

she taught me better.