In Which I Compare My Children to the Apocalypse on a Friday Night By Beth Gordon

Baron Chandler Flickr CC



In Which I Compare My Children to the Apocalypse on a Friday Night

My daughter tells me she is lighting a cigarette in Category 2 winds, she tells me that the water is rising but she will not leave her home, she is listening to Morrisey, she is listening to Hendrix, she is smoking on the deck while her boyfriend offers her fresh baked chicken, processed potato skins, documentaries on Netflix about drownings and electrical outages that happened years ago.  Her sister survived last year’s hurricane in Florida where I had an out of body experience, two days in the car with my chain smoking friend and her haunted cell phone that lit up at every mile marker ending in the number three and I rose above the mannequin at the corner of Eucalyptus and Cowboy Way, her oversized Barbie face and sun-stripped hair seducing me to buy home-grown tomatoes, above the car that no longer shifted to reverse, forcing us forward without rear brakes for 500 miles, above Boris the strawberry-eating pig that my grandson’s other grandmother could not bear to slaughter. All this to say that my girl children should be dead but they are not, they are lightning trapped in bones, they will never lie down in still waters, they will walk from rooms, they will stand in front of boarded windows without flinching or blinking, they will lift the pool cage from its roots, they will bury me in a shallow grave and tell stories of their childhoods where I am a witch in mother’s clothing, they will bring out the Ouija board from beneath the bed, they will join hands and summon me back to the shores of the living.


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​Beth Gordon received her MFA from American University a long time ago and was not heard from again until 2017 when her poems began to appear in numerous journals including Into the Void, Outlook Springs, Drunk Monkeys, SWWIM and After Happy Hour Review. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is also Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.