Amanda Hawk
I Googled My Grandmother’s Old Apartment
The apartment building had faded from warm yellows
to muted grays and blues.
My grandmother lived in the corner near the lawn.
I zoomed in with my Google binoculars
trying to find pixelated images of my grandmother.
To watch her turn the soil into petal jungles
and chat with the hummingbirds.
To see her hold ladybugs in her palms
while I sit at the Kmart patio table
admiring how she created another world.
With oversized pseudanthium and florets twisting
around the fence, windows and our feet.
I wanted to remember the sun
reflecting off her glasses into a blinding smile.
Decades had left a decaying fence, rotted wood, and a dried up lawn.
An empty frame in my grandmother’s old apartment window,
and she wasn’t a time stamp for the click of my mouse to find.
Her bright yellow and blue gardening vest erased
into vacancy and rental rates.
I imagined her garden had thrived, exploding
into white headed daisies and pink roses
that wrapped around the buildings.
Violet irises popped from the door jambs
and big red poppies blossomed into garden thrones.
My grandmother would be humming and spraying the flowers
without the slick slug memory loss
eating away the leaves of her recollections.
Before our names wilted and shriveled beneath her tongue
and she got moved into the nursing home
with locked windows and a guard rail bed.
Her life boxed up and plucked from the apartment
to be piled into a moving truck or donation van.
Knowing beady eyed dementia watched her leave,
and it raced to her garden yanking each plant out by its root
leaving a graveyard of dried up leaves and dandelions.
Low Budget Monsters
My mother went to see A Werewolf in London
while I grew inside her womb,
and I was born howling under a full moon.
My mornings were reserved for sarcastic cartoon rabbits
and spinach obsessed sailors.
Nights were booked for horror flick cocktails of bubbling
forehead transformations and chopping mall shopping sprees.
My mother couldn’t afford movie tickets
and we settled on the late night B-rated hours.
We ritualized popcorn and puffed sleeping bags
as mother clicked off the electric bills
and indulged in some gruesome past time
from a double shift task list.
We pulled on 3-D glasses
and slipped into a red and blue backdrop,
and the monsters reached out
to touch my cheek.
We watched the world end
in a choose your own adventure ranging from comets
that turned humans into dust filled shoes
to houses dragged into the bowels of hell.
She would quick snap cover my eyes
when the frothing wolves or masked madmen entered the screen.
I absorbed the sound of the school girl screams,
thumping blades, and blood drip soundtracks.
It poured under my skin.
But I learned tentacles couldn’t reach me
from the pause button of the VCR,
and the poltergeist couldn’t come
out of a black television screen.
I reserved the sounds
of my mother’s hitched breaths
and lashed out snarls for my nightmares.
The nightly news oozed
underneath doors with shark jaw current events
and crashed into my mother’s single income.
She got possessed by the static wing flicker taglines
spilling out of the news anchor’s blubberous pink lips
to swarm the newsstands and mother couldn’t escape
the fanged trolls of war, politics and taxes.
Stress was a boogeyman that clung to the wrinkles around her eyes
and rested in her clenched fists.
But it festered in my dreams, it haunted me with her bloodshot eyes
and her curled upper lip exposing her angst stained teeth.
She kept turning on our nocturnal creepy crawlies
for dopamine rescues and survival tactics.
I absorbed each thrashing claw and final girl triumph,
until I learned how to laugh through fear.
The Mountains
My mother was born
from sharp ridges and tumbling peaks.
With a mouth full of pine needles and mudslides,
she had callus hand history and back road adventures.
When I splintered from her trunk
she had expected me to be a carbon copy.
A piece of her parents’ depression era survival
and wilderness inspired dogma.
She anticipated me to roll into her rustic storyline
with dust covered boots, ready to wrestle down the sun.
I was dandelion pappuses and cumulus clouds,
tumbling onto summer breezes
and chasing after the owls,
flying from my eyes to the moon.
I had fallen in love with the curls and twists of words
and pressed my petals between pages.
My mother wanted me to be the pinnacle
of glacier coolness and frostbitten reserve.
She erupted every day, shook our house,
trying to shift my range, to mold me
into the perfect mountain.
Each temper earthquake drove a wedge
between her hands and mine, and I learned
mother wasn’t the word for gentle.
Every crack of her lips sent mudslides of disappointment,
her gnarled tongue carving out new insults.
She taught me about tectonic plates.
With enough pressure and force
two bodies could be pushed apart,
and "I love you" couldn’t echo
through her chasm of expectations
built over decades.
My mother was born from the mountains.
Made from craggy boulders and snow-capped summits.
I turned forty and we had only spoken a handful of times,
and still, I found dandelion seeds in my hair
and chased after owls.
Amanda Hawk is Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated Poet. She lives in Seattle between the roaring planes and the city’s neon lights. Amanda has been featured in multiple journals including Volney Road Review, Rogue Agent and the winnow. She released her first chapbook, Rain Stained City, in 2023. She is one of six Puget Sound writers to have their work featured in City of Edmond's Poet's Perspective in 2023.
