Poetry by Ashley Crout
for Carol
1
You can’t know exactly when
your mother is dead to you.
That is the inconvenience.
If you are watching her
body’s antiseptic ache, and she hasn’t
spoken in years, you will eventually will
her chest to fall down and play dead.
If you miss her last rites,
you will always feel that
something is missing, and sometimes
you will know exactly what that is.
That is the inconvenience.
2
I slid out of the vessel too early
just the way I slid in
to a 14-year-old Baptist with a boyfriend
at the time, with a late-night departure
to the Florence Crittenden Home
for unwed mothers in Charleston
where the canons were built
facing their own fort. Even
at the medical college hospital
where their girls go to hatch,
I was the least likely of all,
three pounds, three months early.
You don’t always die when you should.
3
That is the inconvenience.
Sometimes your own survival
means you have to outlive someone
you continue to love.
I know only that my mother gave me up
before I was ready. I know this is why
I never feel fully taken in.
I think of coffin births –
the dying, no, dead and decomposing, body
of the mother forces the baby out.
Decay is really an accumulation
of vapors. The soul hisses
within like snake language and escapes.
It’s the change in air pressure
like a sudden shift in altitude, climbing
out of the Piedmont or sinking
to the graveled floor of the sea.
The direction is less relevant.
4
But I picture an unknown mother drowned
ejecting my cartilage bones and heavy,
nodding head into a world she would never
see, and myself descending into the isolate,
darkening water away from the surface
light just as those who can’t place
heaven or hell think in terms
of our relative distance from God.
But I am so weightless I rise unnoticed.
The first breath you take is a commitment
to breathing. Now you couldn’t stop
if you wanted to. That’s the inconvenience.
In certain circles, there is rumor
of an order to things. You take your leave
only when you need to, when you can
least stand to be the one left.
Ashley Crout was born in Charleston, SC, and graduated from Bard College and the MFA program at Hunter College. She is the recipient of a poetry grant from The Astraea Foundation, has received awards from The Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation and is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been published in Sojourner, New Orleans Review, Atticus Review and Dodging the Rain, among others. She lives in Greenville, SC, with her hound, Stella.
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