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      June 16, 2014My Mother Told Us Not to Have ChildrenRebecca Gayle Howell

      She’d say, Never have a child you don’t want.
      Then she’d say, Of course, I wanted you
       
      once you were here. She’s not cruel. Just practical.
      Like a kitchen knife. Still, the blade. And care.
       
      When she washed my hair, it hurt; her nails
      rooting my thick curls, the water rushing hard.
       
      It felt like drowning, her tenderness.
      As a girl, she’d been the last
       
      of ten to take a bath, which meant she sat
      in dirty water alone; her mother in the yard
       
      bloodletting a chicken; her brothers and sisters
      crickets eating the back forty, gone.
       
      Is gentleness a resource of the privileged?
       
      In this respect, my people were poor.
      We fought to eat and fought each other because
       
      we were tired from fighting. We had no time
      to share. Instead our estate was honesty,
       
      which is not tenderness. In that it is
      a kind of drowning. But also a kind of air.

      from #42 - Winter 2013

      Rebecca Gayle Howell

      “My mother was the daughter of subsistence farmers in Eastern Kentucky. My grandfather chose to raise his family by the old ways because he’d watched the damage done to his brothers when they went to work for industry, for the money economy. Thinking about my grandparents has me wondering about the different kinds of work and the different kinds of wealth. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ These days I’m asking myself—what is my heaven? Is it Target? Is it a tenure track job? What is it that I pursue with my thoughts and actions, with every muscle of my life? And, my god, is that really it? These days I’m thinking it’s never too late to choose the economy of better sense.”

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