Your Mother Knew Many Words for Beauty and Used All of Them to Call You
by MAJA LUKIC
Your head is so light, it will detach
like a gray balloon. When you stand,
the world goes black, buzzes back
like an old bulb. Sometimes hunger
is time stretching, sometimes your
body is an elevator plummeting.
You wear its little thrills with pride.
Your therapist says, Motherless now,
you must learn to mother yourself.
In shop windows, you are strange
to yourself, your face a drifting moon,
eyes and mouth dark shafts. You think
of your mother’s face sliding back
into the shiny lining of the coffin,
a silk dress slipping off a hanger.
You live against beauty. Your
hip bones are paring knives
in your lover’s hands. Every day,
you read Mourning Diary and agree
with Barthes: Many others still love me.
Yes, they do, but it’s not enough.
After the ICU, bananas blackened
in your mother’s hospital bag until,
finally, you threw them out, soft
and rotting, black commas in a long
sentence. How could you eat after that?
Outside, the snow becomes directionless.
Every night, you drink wine and look
at the city, its many illegible lights.
AUDIO
Listen to Maja Lukic read “Your Mother Knew Many Words for Beauty and Used All of Them to Call You.”
Audio recorded by Reed Turchi at Second Take Sound.
This poem was chosen as the winner of the Sita Martin Prize for Shō No. 6.
Maja Lukic is a Brooklyn-based poet. She received an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Poets, the Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves on the Board of Four Way Books, as curator of Four Way’s Translator’s Page, and as a poetry reader for The Swannanoa Review.
See more poems from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25) by purchasing a copy.
Share this poem
Interested in sponsoring or supporting the Sita Martin Prize for Emerging Poets? Please share our fundraising campaign here.