2019 FOLIO POETRY PRIZE Runner-up
By Karen Holmberg
The drawers sigh on waxed runners.
Brass pulls, let go, give tinny knocks.
Just as they did the rare afternoons
she wasn’t home, when we’d slip
into our mother’s room to sniff the pore
of her perfume, or tilt
her iridescent crystals to the light.
In the lowest drawer, we find
three pupae, dormant
in crocheted shrouds. We unswaddle
alternate daughters: a cushiony newborn,
another, once fine, of jaundiced wax,
and the last of glazed plaster,
her face subtly crazed
where the shellac shrinks with age.
My younger sister’s startled O
is gentled by sadness.
This one was hers.
She had gone with our mother
to a junk shop, where she’d found
this doll, bald, sprawled on a shelf
and carried her forward, placing
her five-dollar bill on the counter, asking
is this enough?
She lifts the doll out tenderly. Her palm
cradles the head. She rests the dense
linen cylinder along her arm, tugging down
the pinafore’s tartan plaid
of black, blue, and red, smoothing
the flipped hem of pantalets my mother
trimmed in eyelet. She cups the plump
heel in the heel of her palm, fondling toes
perfectly formed as grains of barley. The tea-cup
wig, real human hair once
chestnut-bright, molds to the head
in flat dull coils. Our older sister urges
Take her, she’d want you to have her. Take her
home. Through a residue of years
I see the yearning
on her face, as if her cells remember
the child she was and sing out
their protective longing.
I see, nested in her face,
other sisters. The woman
I worked with, a lifetime before
I’d given birth to children of my own,
who fostered infants taken
by the state. One, who'd learned by six weeks
never to cry, broken in six places from being
thrown against a wall, she held
along her arm this way, her face
fierce with something absolute,
beyond the borderlands
of love. She hummed
the oldest song, the mother
of all song. My mother’s song, the one
struck into the scarred
stronghold of her heart,
into which she collected
the world’s bruised being.
Karen Holmberg is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Perseids (University of North Texas Press) and Axis Mundi (BkMk Press), which was named one of the top ten poetry titles of 2013 by Slate Magazine. My poems and nonfiction have been published in such journals as Black Warrior Review, New England Review, Poetry East, New Madrid, and At Length, among others.