Helping My Daughter Move into Her First Apartment
This is all I am to her now:
a pair of legs in running shoes,
two arms strung with braided wire.
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs
at me and I accept it gladly, lifting
with my legs, not bending over,
raising each foot high enough
to clear the step. Fortunate to be
of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed,
with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me,
sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner,
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks
of rice and lentils slumped
against my heart: up one flight
of stairs and then another,
down again with nothing in my arms.
a pair of legs in running shoes,
two arms strung with braided wire.
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs
at me and I accept it gladly, lifting
with my legs, not bending over,
raising each foot high enough
to clear the step. Fortunate to be
of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed,
with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me,
sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner,
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks
of rice and lentils slumped
against my heart: up one flight
of stairs and then another,
down again with nothing in my arms.
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Disclaimer
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2006 by Sue Ellen Thompson, and reprinted from When She Named Fire, ed., Andrea Hollander Budy, Autumn House Press, 2009, and reprinted by permission of the poet and publisher. First printed in The Golden Hour, Sue Ellen Thompson, Autumn House Press, 2006. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.