SUPPLY CHAIN > POETRY
In the blur of just waking my mother
feels a glaze of cool moisture on her
head, she touches the sticky stuff,
sees a shocking red in those seconds,
and small prints of fingers and palms
pattern the wall, blue footprints marching
themselves out the bedroom door—
too thick, too blue for blood and each
the size of my little brother’s chubby hands,
feet, the tubes of oils their painter friend
left on her easel last night, the colors
my brother squeezes out where he wants,
the apartment his canvas, the patterns
his own making and our mother arrives
for her job interview clean, well dressed,
with traces of eau de turpentine.
Connemara Wadsworth’s chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early 50’s, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Prairie Schooner, Solstice, Chautauqua, Bellevue Literary Review, and Valparaiso. Her poem, Mediation on a Photo was a winner of The Griffin Museum of Photography’s Once Upon a Time: Photos That Inspire Tall Tales. Connemara and her husband live in Newton, Massachusetts.