Photo by Patel Czerwinski
Small Person
Karen Kilcup
I filled my mother’s clean
midcentury modern spaces
with things to fix the emptiness:
a pigeon the color of cloud,
its wing broken, an orphan
yellow kitten she said
was too young to be split
from its mother.
I swapped her handmade sweater–
three little pigs in pale angora yarn–
for a bright pink K-Mart cardigan
when a schoolmate said
her father had ripped
her dirty flowered dress
at the waist. Mother made me
get the sweater back.
She said the same strange words
each time I offered her a gift:
You can’t save the world.
In our white and wooden
living room, she never
let anything accumulate,
not toys, not clothes, not dust,
not even words.
Karen Kilcup
I filled my mother’s clean
midcentury modern spaces
with things to fix the emptiness:
a pigeon the color of cloud,
its wing broken, an orphan
yellow kitten she said
was too young to be split
from its mother.
I swapped her handmade sweater–
three little pigs in pale angora yarn–
for a bright pink K-Mart cardigan
when a schoolmate said
her father had ripped
her dirty flowered dress
at the waist. Mother made me
get the sweater back.
She said the same strange words
each time I offered her a gift:
You can’t save the world.
In our white and wooden
living room, she never
let anything accumulate,
not toys, not clothes, not dust,
not even words.