Poetry by Brooke Harries

       Nicholas Erwin CC




Content 

It was third grade when my mom was taken
from a rose garden where she had wandered

hallucinating through a pale stone path. 
They put her in a straitjacket, carted her off. 

I wet the bed a few times and didn’t become
a serial killer. Derailed, I lived with my great-aunt 

and uncle, explored their house when I wasn’t 
at school, old postcards and photographs inside 

sitting rooms’ low shelves, turned pictures over 
to read their backs. I recall a decorative birdcage, 

white carpet, an amethyst in gold glass case 
that enchanted me during her hospital stay.

I played and roamed as if she had the flu, 
and no one spoke of mental illness or drug addiction, 

while my pocketed thoughts grew. I don’t know 
how I continue in this body, with the same eyes. 

The mind encases anything. The day her cousin
blow-dried my hair, asked what do you need? I had no idea,

her voice the soft of felt, sudden against skin. 
I was doomed to adopt directness, the candor of survival. 

Tonight I contend that she died, but I lost her
earlier. Like the time she took me to the grocery store so late 

at night I rubbed my eyes, pretended we were on a trip, 
each day I decide who to be, for or despite, my queen. 

Such quests, each memory. Painful as emerging form.
A tight turn on a road at night. From the story in which

she drove into a telephone pole, lost teeth. Before I was born.

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Brooke Harries’ work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Arkansas Review, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, Salamander, Sixth Finch, Tilted House, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship, and the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry. She has an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi.