A house built on sand makes itself felt when a mother
hides glasses of whiskey in the drawers of her vanity table.
That our family was special and blessed was the wishful
fiction read to us children at bedtime. Asteroid and disaster
are linguistic siblings; the Milky Way is a road of milk, a spill
of cream in a black-coffee heaven; and stars, though regarded
as gods by the Greeks, are merely dense balls of gas that spewed
their chemical guts into the galaxy. “Let the stars sit where they will,”
Coyote cries in the Navajo myth, flinging up handfuls of glittering
mica that stick to the sky helter-skelter. My flame-haired mother
saw shades of gray that my father was blind to, yet she projected
her own tortured colors on each of us in turn, her afternoon empathy
sucking me in to be spat upon later. Etymologies tell more truth
about life than the words do themselves, as in the Greek prefix sark
linking “sarcasm” to sarcophagus, literal eater of flesh. Like my mother,
a star in its red giant phase, devouring her innermost planets, the milk
of her human kindness curdled by accusations that ripped me apart
like hyenas tearing the flesh from my bones. A star-crossed ancestral
curse hounded my Janus-faced mother, who winked out at last
like a star.
Sharon Whitehill, a retired English professor from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, is currently enjoying her retirement in Port Charlotte, Florida. After years of hard work and dedication, she has achieved her dream of having her poems published in various literary magazines. She has authored two chapbooks titled “The Umbilical Universe” and “Inside Out to the World,” as well as a full collection called “A Dream of Wide Water.” In spring 2024, she will release her third chapbook titled “This Sad and Tender Time.”
