United States, (b. 1968)
Woman and Child Blowing Bubbles
- The pig’s bladder she takes to her lips and fills like a lung,
- slips in shiny pebbles, a plaything
- for her daughter to rattle over tiles. They say she spoils her,
- and her daughter’s sleeves drip wet lace, it’s true,
- as they dip dinner utensils through dishwater to spray bubbles
- through the kitchen gloom. The dog her daughter manhandles
- with love rough as any boy, though when she holds this child,
- they both go limp with need. How she loves to be coddled,
- to be told she is perfect, precious, all the things you are not to tell
- your children for fear they will think they are owed
- all pleasures: the split carcasses strewn across her butcher’s block,
- the mincemeat pies broken open on her table, the sweets stacked
- and canned in the cupboard. But she knows no girl
- turned to whoring for the love of meat, only the girls at the tavern
- too starved to know their own need, teeth broken on brutality.
- So she coddles her daughter, who begs her
- each morning to play, play rather than fill the washtub,
- and her girl is strong willed, that is true, and can throw a storm
- of a fit, which rattles the neighbors, but she is sharper
- than the tomato knife, keener than the serrated grapefruit spoons
- they use some nights when they sit out back, scooping the sweet-tart
- slices to their mouths. Clinging to her mother’s broadcloth, she knows
- nothing of the marriage bed, but, perhaps, her mother thinks,
- with a mind like that and the will besides, she’ll find a way
- to fill the ballooning emptiness, rattling like knuckle bones at every woman’s ribs.
About the Poet:
Nadine Sabra Meyer, United States, (b. 1968), is a poet, researcher and educator. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Literary Imagination, Boulevard, and The Missouri Review. Meyer has won the New Letters Prize for Poetry as well as a Pushcart Prize for her poetry.
She earn her M.F.A. from George Mason University and then a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her teaching interests include introduction to creative writing, upper-level poetry writing courses, contemporary American poetry, Renaissance lyric poetry, and poetry and memoir written after the Holocaust.
Meyer is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Gettysburg College, and and is a Co-director of programming for Gettysburg College’s Young Writers’ Workshop. [DES-01/22]
Additional information:
- Nadine Sabra Meyer – https://www.nadinesabrameyer.com/
- Dr. Nadine Meyer – Gettysburg College