banner with text: How do we open to multiple possibilities of being alive across time?

Madeline Simms

After toilet,

I lift Jonah to the sink, my lone reflection

crowds the bathroom mirror. Spat toothpaste, a product

of my own disregard, flecks my tender image. Neglect builds

a sullied halo around the tub,

dirt under nail. Not every care-taker

takes care. Even the nurse, how

they would just push the bowels back inside her.

I recoil. How dare. I admonish. And yet,

saddled with my own shit-stained province, I lie

to Jonah, tell him only little boys use diapers.

“You don’t look like a little boy,” I say,

his small reflection absent from the frame.

Unresponsible for his future, I could tell him anything

and still be a nun: his quick wrist, my chiding eye,

I promise a chocolate only heaven will hold.

Dropped Stitch


	after Kwoya Fagin Maples

I don’t remember who but my mother was not
	the voice instructing				Sprinkle sugar
to proof the yeast			the sweet assistance

			of Ms. Tea’s hand as my child-own
	found piano keys slow clinking jewels

and Mrs. Kings who carried me					and my sister’s harmony
on the shoulders of church hymns

	down to the ladies of the library basement knitting
	and picking up dropped stitches
					like the outstretched loop

	of a tired child’s arms, heavy eyes

	like slow wings			I join this invisible brigade
of childless and caring						watch the dough rise

then harden into the final shoe size of the very laces
I once tied		mothered without the mothering

scars, no stretchmarks to prove it					and yet I am just as undone
as any hand suddenly dropped

at the crosswalk, we all let go – I can’t

			stop watching an old recording
of Rian and Jonah:
					they are eating bread
and laughing		I wonder if they remember how to knead
	the way I taught them
	palm-pushed until resistance,
				try hard, I will not forgo
their lisp and grin				try easy
				and years later, I am their stranger.
					One day I will
					or won’t hold a child
of my own
and those names I have forgotten will be unearthed
			in these lessons, the scarves
			I wrap around chapped and ruddy chins.

of the photos I’ve sent to anxious mothers

after the photograph of children in the tea room with a nun, courtesy of the Adoption Rights Alliance

here: I will be gentle, dare I say

like your mother. The photo lies, proving

only coaxed and unlucky spoonfuls

of cold Spaghetti. Pouted lips stained

by stubborn tries, the same force

that snatched his small wrist one afternoon

in the carpark. He screamed, I screamed

We must be careful and I cannot

believe the mark of worry or was it fear? His own

mother asking What did you get up to this afternoon?

I tell myself there is no way he will remember

the taste of tomatoes wielded by my hand,

the color of my hair, or each time I struggled

to boost his chin to the window

saying look, a birdie: what does a photo hold

but what we could lift to that fleeting?

Snapshot, a weak post

to tie anything to. Flash, just that:

I set the child down and pick up

the stare of gaunt cherubs, captured

by black-and-white-forever-

captioned: Children sit in a tea room

with a nun posing for a photo. Looming

Sister in the corner, she is a moon

unphased. Impervious witness. Habit

whiter than the very mug and saucer set

before the hollow child. Cup an empty

bell, each shoe a small clapper ringing

in the girl-mother’s ear. Absent

from the frame, could she ever look

back? The ragged news-clipping fades,

weak tea, bad promise of gentle. Sun thinning

newsprint to gauze, a salve wrapped around

her hand, ripped so impossibly raw.

The poems “After toilet,” “Dropped Stitch,” and “of the photos I’ve sent to anxious mothers,” are dedicated to the mothers and children affected by the atrocities of the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Galway.

The italicized quotation in “After toilet” is from an eye-witness account who gave birth in the Tuam Home in 1951.

Madeline Simms is a creative with midwestern roots. She currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where she is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing. Madeline is a recipient of the 2023 AWP Intro Award in Fiction. Her work is forthcoming in Indiana Review and appears in Poet Lore, Quarterly West, The Journal, and elsewhere.

@madsimmz
https://www.madelinesimms.com/

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