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      September 10, 2015One Among a Thousand Possible VersionsAlison Luterman

      The backyard lilacs were my mother’s favorite.
      You could swoon from their scent in the spring.
      You could lie on your back all afternoon
      looking up through their purple calligraphy
      to emerge hours later with a damp shirt back,
      light-headed and dizzy.
      I remember her thin, tensile arm,
      the flashing cuts of her engagement ring
      when she gripped our skinny wrists.
      My fragile, ferocious mother
      denied ever raising a hand against us,
      even when my father caught her
      washing my sister’s mouth out with soap.
      Her denials were epic and dazzling,
      cathedral-like in their complexity, and unending.
      She taped a poster to our front door:
      “War Is Not Good for Children and Other Living Things”
      and wore her MIA bracelet for decades,
      long after the U.S. had left Vietnam.
      Her missing soldier was never found.
      “Her missing soldier was never found.”
      As good an epitaph as any.
      The war in our home went on and on.
      She took me to Washington with her,
      and we marched, in protest, at Nixon’s inaugural.
      Black shrouds covered our faces,
      and around our necks we hung signs which read
      “Hanoi” and “Saigon.”
      A poem like this should have flowers in it,
      or at least the skreel of bagpipes.
      Because she wore so many veils I go naked
      and tell and tell, too much of everything.
      She would have fought and died for us
      if only we’d lived under siege.
      We lived under siege.
      Still, she made sure I went to France,
      and took me to plays where she cried in the dark.
      The closest I ever felt to her
      was the one time, parked in the car,
      when I blurted out, “I always felt
      you weren’t really my mother,”
      and she shocked me by saying, “I know. I’ve never felt
      it either.” Afterwards, of course, she denied it.
      But even a few words of truth create their own star.
      And that’s what she is for me now,
      a fugitive beacon, often obscured
      by smog or cloud cover,
      but blazing relentlessly, bright and far.

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Alison Luterman

      “I write poems, eavesdrop, loiter, teach, and pull weeds, in no particular order.”