The Many Names for Mother

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781606353738
• eBook ISBN: 9781631013676
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

Ellen Bass, Judge

"A compelling book about origins—of ancestry, memory, and language"—Ellen Bass

The Many Names for Mother is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This evocative collection hovers around history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union to the poet's travels, while pregnant with her son, to death camp sites in Poland. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dasbach ponders how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience comes to influence her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child.

A series of poems titled "Other women don't tell you" becomes a refrain throughout the book, echoing the unspoken or taboo aspects of motherhood, from pregnancy to the postpartum body. The Many Names for Mother emphasizes that there is no single narrative of motherhood, no finite image of her body or its transformation, and no unified name for any of this experience. The collection is a reminder of the mothers we all come from, urging us to remember both our named and unnamed pasts.

I. Drowned

AGAINST NAMING

Let’s not name her or compare

flesh to fruit. Let’s joke instead

how she swallowed a seed and let it

grow inside her. Just imagine,

how heavy is that sound and what

it tastes like in ripe summertime heat.

I had no cravings though. Only wanted to touch

the cold or be touched. Polish berries carried

the winter, so I ate them by the bucket.

Gooseberries, currants, sour cherries, bursting

childhood in my mouth. A past made sweeter

by its being passed. My mother sweating through

tolkuchka—the little push ’n’ shove bazar—

to return home with a stained skirt and fruit

dangling from her ears and me, hungry

inside her. The Krakow market was a harvest too

this hottest July on record and in Oświęcim, the camps

didn’t know what to do with all the people

in such heat, so at the gates of Auschwitz

sprinklers appeared—for the children mostly.

And you, my love, were just about the size

of a heart inside me then, soft

and wanting. Water and a past

that isn’t this. One not passed down.

But I carried you there anyway. Against

my family’s urges. Against even your future

ones, maybe. Walked you miles across

black ground turned red then gray then left

for colorless. The dead beneath us

silent. The ones around us, growing.

And I sang to you of a golden city

under a paling sky with its magic garden

and single star and the flame-maned lion

waiting there. You listened, my love, perhaps

they did too, ashes rising in the creek and in the petals,

Birkenau’s waters and purple wildflowers,

its big book of names

from which we did not choose

to name you. Valen, valiant, strong, unmarked

by ancestry or first generation or Slavic or fruit.

But V, for the survivor who refused

to be named that, for the numbered and unnumbered

names unwritten and scattered there, for the woman

who made seeds grow as gorgeous

out of flesh as out of stone.

FOR WAR AND WATER

Everyone is having boys, my mother says.

That means war is coming. The way

it came in the old country—boys

rising out of the ice and cold

potato fields, boys laying bricks

and digging, wells and trenches

and bodies—boys out of other boys

like my boy, born the year before

cops killed even more black boys

and more boys killed other boys

for loving boys and more

swastikas showed up on walls

and more walls went up, invisible, where

once ran rivers. But a river

is not a boy. A river can either

run dry or bleed and everyone

will blame someone

darker or an animal, that gorilla

who dragged away the little boy

or the gator who stole another.

But in the water, they seem

so strong, resilient even, these boys

born months apart, these boys

who suck the water down, who beat it

with their tiny fists and kick as though

they’re running, these boys who grow

not knowing they were born for war

and that it’s everywhere

and there is no

outrunning water.

OTHER WOMEN DON’T TELL YOU

about the hair, how it falls out, webs

between your fingers and streams

in the shower and clumps on your pillow

and on the floor and in the hands of one

who still loves you. They say it’ll grow back.

Thicker even. But you don’t believe them.

They’ve lied before. And they don’t tell you

about the split, how you can fit

a fist between your left and right sides.

You can work to make it narrower, they say,

build back the muscles in your abdomen

and pelvic floor. It just takes time.

You can get it all back, they say, but you know

that is not the point. And you knew you’d be tired,

that the body can only keep up for so long.

They warned you days would be long but years

would fly and again, they were wrong,

because everything is flying and the rain

is coming down the way July had never known it.

And you think, my body was an ark once.

And you ask, would it still float? And in days,

your son will have breathed air as long as water.

And maybe Noah...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Afraid Ancestral
• I. Drowned
• II. Light
• III. Animal
• IV. Drowned Animal of Light
• V. Home Eternal, Rising
• Acknowledgments
• Notes