2021 Spring Contest Runner-Up in Poetry: mama,
By Daniel B. Summerhill
knows what it’s like to hold & not
be held mama nancy, who is not my
mama, but is the oldest mama i have
a name for in this way, history is
young, not because it is young, but
because it goes only as far back as
we have a story & i’d like to think
memory counts for something three
women separate her from my mama
each of them a comma, each of them
should have been a semicolon, but we
know genealogy isn’t forgiving that
way i’m the son of all four & i am
told, by mama, that her earliest recall
of joy, was being handed a quarter
to buy a hamburger & still having
fifteen cents left over to buy penny
candy this girl, a woman, a mother
who has never been to the bottom
of the earth & not that any long-haul
flight will buy happiness, but being
awaken by the unswallowed sun over
the southern ocean seems like a cheat code
for sustained joy i say sustained in
the sense that the sunrise is the only
infinite rhythm i’ve seen this isn’t
a poem about joy, so much as it is
a poem about dying without ever knowing
it but mama, you’ve always stricken me
as someone who champions distance over
depth or faith over long suffering in
this way, i suppose joy isn’t the antonym
to pain, but the antibody it is 1998, &
you have just given me a pink
food stamp, enough to buy a zebra cake,
kool-aid jammer and three packs of now
& laters the walk to the corner store:
my faith, the slow skip back home: small
joy here, my perception of small is grand
enough to get me through the immensity
of summer how my mother summoned
enough jubilance to share with me its
blood it is 2018 & i think of my trip to
south africa as a metaphor for food stamps
the flight: my faith, the flight: my joy—
what i don’t deserve, not considered here
the miles between me & the earth: stretched
faith carrying me back home i search
out my window for land, but find nothing
green, just blue plenty blue to feel small
enough to remember my small mama
with outstretched hands— waiting
for a quarter, for joy a girl, a woman, dear
mama: your water will come, & the sun
will brass knuckle its way out the ocean
with enough triumph to make you feel
golden the ocean is the only constant
here, it delivers us all, i’d imagine
it’ll deliver you too, if not you, your body,
if not your joy, your pain, it will carry it
in its mouth, back to shore, like a flood
About the author:
Daniel B. Summerhill is Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action and Composition Studies at California State University Monterey Bay. He has performed in over thirty states, The UK, and was invited by the US Embassy to guest lecture and perform in South Africa. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Anti-Heroin Chic, Rust + Moth, Button Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Flypaper, Cogs, The Hellebore, and others. His debut collection Divine, Divine, Divine is available now from Oakland- based -Nomadic Press. His sophomore collection, Mausoleum of Flowers will be published by CavanKerry Press in April 2022.
Image courtesy of the author.
