April 22, 2025
This week’s poem is inspired by another poem (posted below) I found last week on the Poetry Foundation website. For my own writing, I decided to use the mention of the car in the poem, as well as the age of the speaker, as elements to include. If you are up for a writing challenge, I invite you to use a version of these elements in a new piece of writing. And I’d love for you to send your writing to me so I can share it on my website. (Click the “Writing Challenges!” tab to see the results from previous challenges). My own response follows.
Watching My Mother
by Jessica Abughattas
Beside the Ford Thunderbird,
a suitcase splayed open.
She collects her clothes
from the driveway.
The yellow jumper collapses
into a million threads of saffron.
She keeps dropping them.
They wither and dissolve,
petal by petal
into pavement.
Her hands are rivers.
Her eyes, mascara bats.
Her hair is crying.
I am five and perfect.
My poem:
Sun-Maid
I am five in the backseat of my grandmother’s Lincoln Continental and we’re going to the movies because it’s raining or because it’s the last day of vacation or because my sister and I are sunburned from so much time at the apartment pool and cranky from the aloe vera sticky on our legs. In our theater seats, my grandmother will pull from her stiff pocketbook twin travel-size packs of Sun-Maid raisins and she will take a small eternity to open each one and hand them to us. I will want the popcorn from the thin man in the paper hat scooping bright clouds of kernels into crinkly bags, but there is no chance with my grandmother. I will take the raisins and be quiet as the credits begin and for the rest of the afternoon, pinching the wrinkled nubs into my mouth one at a time. There will be two more years of silence and sunburns and last vacation days and drives in the long car with the windows that never come down. Two more years of my grandmother’s beehive blocking the view out the windshield and the seatbelt tight across my lap and the car door too heavy for me to shut myself. Two more years of Fort Lauderdale and the echoey sound of the garage gate opening and closing and our backs against the leather. Two more years of popcorn smells and rain and lobbies where the thin man scoops clouds and two more years of the small eternity of my grandmother’s hands and a girl in a red bonnet and a cascade of brown hair trying to convince me to take what is offered and two more years before I don’t have to anymore.