On leave from the sanatorium,
I walk my departed mother’s house:
her bottle cap collection, portraits, pickles,
notes on the daughter she couldn’t marry off.
If only I hadn’t stuttered, slouched
or blotched my makeup, if only I’d sashayed
like Princess Di, spoken French and played Chopin;
I’d have matched the whims of any man.
Now my legs creak with the stairs I climb
past kimonos folded and boxed.
My nephew should catch me if I fall
but he sleeps in the spare room, door open,
hugging quilts that mother patched. I watch him breathe.
The grip that shaped me crowds my breath away.
About the author
Michael Morical is a freelance editor in Taipei. He has lived in Taiwan for twelve of the last twenty-five years. He has also spent…
Read the full bioIssue 10 · September 2010
Table of contents
- From the editors
- Poetry
- Postcard Prose
- Travel Notes
More from The Journal
- Visual Poetry
- Visual Poetry
By Zachary Gambrill
black ink on paper
- Visual Poetry
By Zachary Gambrill
comic book cover
- Postcard Prose
By Lauren Barbato
I’d been thinking about leaving. I’d been thinking how there’s something about out here. Before long it’s a new January and you’re hungover with a heartache for a man you won’t see for several years until he pops up on that very popular, critically-acclaimed sitcom with that actress you learned to like, then hate, then feign indifference abou
- Poetry
The leak in your breathing/
tube makes a cartoon squeak./
It takes two nurses, silent/
as nuns, to place you/
in my arms...
- Poetry
If I have already/
gone insane/
but I want to get/
crazier yet,/
what’s my move?/
Go outsane?
See more Poetry, Visual Poetry, or Postcard Prose
