Cadence

Hannah Stephenson

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631013430
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice. The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified.

Cadence captures the poet's point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity. The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyperattentive to others' needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to.

The central tenets of this chapbook: ideas of the body, pregnancy, and motherhood; how becoming a parent destabilizes the self; local anxieties (What if my child doesn't eat enough? How will I ever sleep again?) and global anxieties (How do we respond to these tumultuous times, full of such hate, racism, and xenophobia? How do we help?); and the ever-deepening desire to protect those who are (increasingly) threatened.

THEOREMS AND PROOFS

One day, you’ll wish for this back

is what every mother she knows passes along to her, their voices pinched with clothespins clinging onto sheets that balloon and billow and jerk.

How will I get through this time

Because it will end. As will the ember of all that you experience, your very ability to experience in and of itself.

The day she comes home from the hospital

full of bruises and stitches, she stubs her toe on the changing table. It surprises her, that this hurts a little, like before she was a mother.

She didn’t remember remembering that song

but while kissing her son’s toes, she starts singing, Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree … This is how we know that music and time are made of fishhooks.

The baby sleeps two hours this afternoon

so that inside himself his body can grow. These two hours will not be remembered. He will not look back on them fondly, because he will not look back on them at all.

Naps are lilypads

for the baby, his brain. He will hop toward who he is becoming, hour by hour.

We cry for the refugees

only after their children drown. Only after we see the photographs.

I live in a hollow tree

So says the book that the baby loves. That she thinks he loves. Not for the words, but for their sounds. For the way his mother flutters her fingers over the pages and says wwwwshhhhh to make the snow tumble. As the snow tumbles outside.

No one sees any of this

except the mother. Except the baby. It is unremarkable, but there is beauty there. The house grows up around them, a pumpkin, a carriage, a hollow tree.

Taking him into the sun

I learn how strong the light is, how strong the wind is. Mother: a shield.

We’re going around the block

and as we pass a thing I share its simplest name. A tree. A pond. A bird. A rock. This is my way of giving them to him.

She narrates her own actions

as she does them, calling herself Mommy before her son. This becomes her new habit, casting out a net of language into the future to protect her baby, to encourage the world’s softness and obedience. This is the part of hide-and-seek where the seeker calls out to the hider, Ready or not, here we come.

What is the correct pronoun

for her, for me, for the self. These days, she is more aware of the actions of the self, less aware of the self. The girl. The woman. The mother. Me.

The streets all end in leaf

Palmleaf, Littleleaf, and our street, Starleaf. If the streets are branches, the houses are leaves. If the streets are leaves, the houses are the veins, the palm-creases.

All from love, and no fear

is what Elie Tahari tells the fashion designers on Project Runway. I watch episode after episode while he nurses, sleeps, teaches me about stillness.

Each day I write a new story

but each day will also be sewn together in a larger story, and each year that book will be sewn between empty covers that grow fuller, fuller, fuller. And a shelf ...