“Two Birds” (2021)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
My father called me beautiful,
then took pictures, asked me to pose
like Marilyn Monroe, except I was five
and shirtless, tiny chest exposed.
At fifteen, he shot me in black velvet,
my back against a railing. Captured me
last at twenty-five—bikinied, thighs spread
in white sand—like he was some
Sports Illustrated photography man.
Out to lunch with my mother,
both of us adults,
a waiter says we look alike.
My mother replies, Oh,
she’s much better looking than I.
Now I understand:
It’s a competition.
I hold that moment—
my consolation prize.
I never called my mother beautiful.
She wore big glasses, sweatsuits,
a dull brown mullet. But once,
when she was swimming
alone, I saw it: Shoulders
bare, hair slicked. Her eyes,
andalusite. Her lips, divine.
The picture taken at the science museum while I was away
on a day-long retreat. She’s in the children’s room,
entertained by a bevy of tactile options, including a set
of plastic organs you can dissect by simply pulling them
apart. In a stab at realism, the heart is painted battleship
gray, leaving color to the red and blue vessels
woven across the muscle’s surface. My daughter,
ponytailed, dressed in her space-dyed sweater
holds up one coronary chunk in each fist. I’m shocked
she doesn’t think herself too old for this.
And whose heart is it that’s been broken? Surely not
my daughter, who wears the biggest smile I’ve seen
in weeks, as if in sheer joy at this act of dismantling,
the way she smiled the first time she figured out
how to remove her own diaper, daubed brown
across the bedroom wall. Don’t wait for me to say
it’s my own coeur, my cuore, my corazón that’s split
like some mealy apple. What I’ve got inside my chest
is still intact. Even since my daughter and I stood
below a train trestle and she said she wasn’t sure
I was one of her tribe. Even when I shaved my head
again and she cried, said I sucked for not looking
like other mothers. Even now that she rarely
lets me hug her, that she worries for hours before
the bathroom mirror. Even last night, when she
brought me a cup of tea without my asking as I lay
sick in bed, the saucer garnished with blueberries,
salt-brushed almonds. Then dumped by accident
the scalding brew over my nightstand with its books
of poetry and magic, the cream-colored carpet.
The nightstand’s varnish now cloudy, the carpet
clotted with a faint red stain. How lucky I am
to have been given such a mess. What grace
these reminders that someone loves me that much.
Morrow Dowdle: I am a queer, genderfluid poet living in rural Durham, NC. I like to say that “poetry is life, the rest is just details”—except for my kids, of course! In addition to writing, I am an amateur herbalist and a student of all things mystical and mysterious. I studied art history as an undergrad and have curated ekphrastic exhibits featuring both visual art and poetry since 2010. If I could, I would live in a treehouse in the forest. All of the pieces I have submitted for review relate to motherhood: my identity as a mother who does not identify as a woman yet seeks to connect authentically with their anima; my fraught relationship with my own mother; and simply navigating the complexity of mothering a daughter on the verge of adolescence.