Contraction
By Regan Darling
Writer’s Intro:
“I pulled two prose pieces that were written about three years apart. In each, I describe my mother but I was proud to see that I see forgiveness and love in the second writing excerpt (2021) whereas the first (2018), the tone of the woman writing is detached and resentful ... true at the time.”
22/05/2018
The Queen of England is a Nymphomaniac
Somewhere like this, I was conceived.
I was conceived in Doggerland
My father was a night fisherman
My mother, the Queen of England
A cross dressing call girl.
Who heated milk in a saucepan for me every night.
Come morning, told me irritating truths.
Poorly-timed unzipped flies, impromptu eavesdroppers, belly buttons, and fleas.
The Queen of England is a Nymphomaniac.
Her knuckles are swollen
Inflated like a balloon-dog
The Queen of England always leaves the stove on.
And forgets cash in her pockets.
She moans too much.
Klepto
Backseat driver.
Rachmaninoff Fenatic
Plays the piano, poorly.
Stitches badly.
Loves carelessly.
Listens mutely
Fattens up like a pig on Crisco.
“Ad astra per aspera.”
She crooned in my ear.
And so
At Church services
I leafed through pews of
Pios pyro’s engulfed by all things agnostic.
That night my voice echoed like a late night radio show
My mother gave me her old pair of leather gloves.
I like to wear them, not because it’s cold out, but because
they make me feel like a Sex Worker
The president
A tattoo artist.
A lobster trapper.
A belt.
A pistol.
18/03/21
Mother
What I’ve never understood about them is their shocking resemblance to a cockroach. A benevolent cockroach, but a cockroach, nonetheless. This all may sound harsh, and if so, I apologize. But really, it’s not a flat abdomen or two antenna that cause me to draw that conclusion. No, there is something positively repugnant about the way they survive, crawl, and feed on the world and the people around them.
One day, they told me I carved the alphabet into the kitchen table, and I was so positively pleased with myself that they couldn’t even be angry with me.
They are a pathological liar. A fibbing, two-timing, arthropod, they are. I’ve heard that both subjects have a fear of newspapers, but the Jury is still out.
However daunting newspapers are, this cockroach loved Shakespeare and Kipling. They hated Emily Dickinson, though. Once Emily had said that she never had to see the sea to be able to write about it, and they found that positively pompous.
And yet their arms are the limbs that nurtured me, and the voice that crooned to me while I was small and afraid came from their very human, very soft diaphragm, not some beastly mandible.
There is a beautiful quality to their full laugh, their tenacity, their strength. They are not callous all the time, and in fact that mahogany shell gleams in springtime sun.
And I miss them. That cockroach. I miss it, because they could be kind and sometimes in the morning, I would wake up to the sound of a piano drifting through the floorboards. Their fingers are peasant-like (that is self-proclaimed by the way), but God, they are nimble on keys.