Poems about Mom - Every Day Poems

How Ridiculous That I Am by Kim Hooper

Kim Hooper is the author of six novels, including People Who Knew Me, which was adapted into an episodic podcast from BBC Sounds.

How Ridiculous That I Am

by Kim Hooper

This morning, I fought
with my daughter about
her refusal to take another
bite of vanilla-flavored
Greek yogurt while, a world
away, other mothers fought
for their children to live
another day.

On that small strip
of land, two million people
wait on death row, sentenced
to terror for the crime
of existing. Half of them,
children. So many
children. One killed every
ten minutes, the headline
reads. The post below it—a
joke about the inconvenience
of the end of Daylight Savings.

Dawg it feel like it’s 14pm.

I laugh and then wonder how
such a thing is possible—
how can any human being laugh
now, or ever again?
I am stressed about jury duty
and the Santa Ana winds making
my eyes burn and the dog-sitting
I shouldn’t have agreed to and
the school closure on Veterans Day
when I have to work at my job,
spending hours on Zoom calls
about how to better sell
expensive beauty products
to women who feel inadequate
without them.

How ridiculous that I am
capable of stress when there are
no airstrikes here, no bombs
dropping like meteors from the sky,
when I have food and water
and shelter and the basic
assurance that my daughter
and I will be alive tomorrow.

How ridiculous that I am
capable of brushing my teeth
and taking my vitamins and
bookmarking pad thai recipes
without sobbing about
the chubby baby arms
sticking out of rubble.

How ridiculous that I am,
when so many are not.

Tonight, we will watch
Fancy Nancy and lick popsicles
and I will tell her a bedtime
story about unicorns and
magic and think about
all those children, so many
children, who will never believe
in unicorns or magic
because even if they live,
they’ve seen too much
to believe in anything.

I will let my daughter sleep
with me and she will pull
all the sheets to her side and
I will wake up cold, perturbed.
How ridiculous that I am
anything but overjoyed to
watch her sleeping face,
mouth open, eyelashes fluttering.
How ridiculous that I am
anything less than grateful
for the warmth of her body,
the smell of her hair—fruity
from the detangler spray.

How ridiculous that I am,
when so many are not.

###

Kim Hooper is the author of six novels, including People Who Knew Me, which was adapted into an episodic podcast from BBC Sounds. She lives in southern California with her daughter and too many pets.

Glosa for My Deteriorating Mother

Haro Lee lives in South Korea with her grandmother. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Zone 3 Press, The Offing, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. She was also the recipient of Epiphany Magazine’s Breakout

Glosa for My Deteriorating Mother
by Haro Lee

I don’t ask you to love me always like this,
but I ask you to remember.
Somewhere inside me
there’ll always be the person I am tonight
–Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Your hair, it’s summoned by moonlight now–
One day I noticed
how your middle parting beamed
at me. A silver embroidery. The first unwrapping
of fish cartilage by nature’s teeth.
It was so easy to dismiss
it then. After you painted your roots
we both went back to normal,
that new tapestry allowing us to miss
the warning: I don’t ask you to love me always like this.

That was a long time ago. The first
season that produced white foliage,
it returned. The tufts that grew
you painted over like swans
dipping themselves in night’s lake, emerging
black again. Your timber
weakened. The strands grew thin, breaking
off, the charcoal of it turning brown, burnt sienna,
then a sick jaundice. You’d grab a tender
bunch of it. Understand. But I ask you to remember

when being young mattered to you.
When you were always there,
always for me, you on a silver platter,
the crop of your head
a waterfall that always ran black.
Black vines, black veins, black sea,
rich of dark matter.
The memories of a younger you
burn something beastly,
something molten, somewhere inside me,

yearning. But your hair now,
you catch seasons with it.
Your head is a winter lake, flash frozen by age.
And you know how much I want
to break the ice, search for something bleak. Maybe you,
twenty years younger, a crown of night
growing from your head.
A younger you,
promising, against time’s flight:
There will always be the person I am tonight.

Kitchen Companions by Joan Kantor

Joan Kantor is the author of five poetry collections. She won First Place for poetry in The 2015 Writers Digest Self Published Book Awards for Fading Into Focus

Kitchen Companions

by Joan Kantor

for my mother, who so joyfully shared her kitchen with me

My mother’s been waiting for me
to open the small drawer beside the stove,
where smiling with anticipation,
I reach for the dingy-pink metal measuring spoons
that once were hers.
They clatter and clink,
till firmly cradled in my hands,
they radiate a warmth
that rushes through me.
As time disappears,
she and I silently begin to converse
and proceed with preparations
for a meal she’ll never share.
She’d like me to use her crusty black cast iron pan,
but I’m saving its heft
for the day those tiny spoons
will no longer be enough
to stir her up.

Joan Kantor is the author of five poetry collections. She won First Place for poetry in The 2015 Writers Digest Self Published Book Awards for Fading Into Focus, a memoir focused on Alzheimer’s Disease and family relationships. Her memoir, Holding It Together (a hybrid of poetry and prose) tells the story of surviving a family legacy of mental illness. Joan also took first place for poetry in The 2013 Hackney Literary Awards, has been widely published in literary journals, been a mentor and judge in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival’s Fresh Voices program, and currently performs in Stringing Words Together, a violin and poetry duo. Her most recent collection, Too Close For Comfort, was published in the summer of 2016 (Aldrich Press).