Every day she picked me up in her cloud hands,
carried me around Chicago on the command-shift of her hip,
close enough to feel laughter jumping up and out from inside her,
close enough that her body was everything,
closing her hands over mine,
God of my beginning, June of 1999:
storyteller, girl-carrier, honey-milk-maker,
star-watcher, moon-runner.
She taught me how to make a fist with my thumb outside it
because she was merciless,
walked and talked like every shadow belonged to her,
like she wouldn’t hesitate to disinherit the earth.
She taught me the necromancy of oranges,
how to light a bundle of sage and smoke out the whole house,
how to answer the inevitable heat death of the known universe
with breakfast, You’ll feel better once you’ve eaten,
bacon sizzling while meteors fell,
taught me sunflower oil,
taught me to wear silver to weddings for luck,
taught me to never give up anything
before I was good and ready to give it up,
taught me how to ride a bike with a broken spoke,
how to loosen the spoke on the opposite side
and steady the bike’s bones, get my body home,
how to make minute, even stitches and her attention was infinite
and even when I grew too big for her to bear the brunt of me,
she was a planet I circled like Io—
all the gravity I needed was her face in front of me.
Isabelle Doyle is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Brown University, studying English and Literary Arts. Her poetry has been published in such literary magazines as Bluestem Magazine, Typo Magazine, Thin Noon, Cargoes, The Blue Pencil Online, The Round, Clerestory, and Triangle. Her full-length poetry manuscript, BABYFACE, was the 2018 recipient of the Frances Mason Harris Prize, established in 1983, which is awarded annually to a woman undergraduate or graduate student at Brown University for a book-length manuscript of poetry or prose-fiction.
carried me around Chicago on the command-shift of her hip,
close enough to feel laughter jumping up and out from inside her,
close enough that her body was everything,
closing her hands over mine,
God of my beginning, June of 1999:
storyteller, girl-carrier, honey-milk-maker,
star-watcher, moon-runner.
She taught me how to make a fist with my thumb outside it
because she was merciless,
walked and talked like every shadow belonged to her,
like she wouldn’t hesitate to disinherit the earth.
She taught me the necromancy of oranges,
how to light a bundle of sage and smoke out the whole house,
how to answer the inevitable heat death of the known universe
with breakfast, You’ll feel better once you’ve eaten,
bacon sizzling while meteors fell,
taught me sunflower oil,
taught me to wear silver to weddings for luck,
taught me to never give up anything
before I was good and ready to give it up,
taught me how to ride a bike with a broken spoke,
how to loosen the spoke on the opposite side
and steady the bike’s bones, get my body home,
how to make minute, even stitches and her attention was infinite
and even when I grew too big for her to bear the brunt of me,
she was a planet I circled like Io—
all the gravity I needed was her face in front of me.
Isabelle Doyle is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Brown University, studying English and Literary Arts. Her poetry has been published in such literary magazines as Bluestem Magazine, Typo Magazine, Thin Noon, Cargoes, The Blue Pencil Online, The Round, Clerestory, and Triangle. Her full-length poetry manuscript, BABYFACE, was the 2018 recipient of the Frances Mason Harris Prize, established in 1983, which is awarded annually to a woman undergraduate or graduate student at Brown University for a book-length manuscript of poetry or prose-fiction.
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