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suzannah Dalzell
The Epoch of Incredulity
We used to be just alike, you wrote, bewilderment staining the page brown like invisible lemon juice ink
held over a candle.
True, we speak with one voice—cadence, timbre, tone—share an unshakable craving for nicotine, a certain curvature of spine,
but what you see, Mother, is a likeness molded from an unstable medium,
now cracked and discolored like those figures you carved
from bars of Ivory soap and painted with fine-tipped brushes.
Among the lovely ladies clad in velvet and sprigged muslin,
an old woman in mobcap
holding two pins and a tiny ball of yarn.
One Halloween it was this character
you dressed me as—Dickens’ Madame Defarge, who knit as the guillotines fell.
Scarf crossed over new breasts, tricolor cockade and knife in girdle,
I proudly marched off to school,
but came home in tears having forgotten who I was supposed to be.
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Dalzell lives on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, Washington, where she divides her time between writing and wetland conservation. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Flyway, Adanna, About Place, Crosswinds, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Naugatuck River Review and Months to Years. She is currently working on a collection of poems that explores the places where her ancestry intersects with race, class and environmental damage.