Alison Thumel

My Mother Tells Me of the American Dream

The small house was on a big lot,
just like the real estate listing promised—
All That Land.

In photos the lot is long, narrow
as a bowling alley, walled by maples.
Over the fence, a creek and apple trees.
By October, branches were too bare
to hide the missile site just beyond.
My mother didn’t mention
whether missiles were built or stored
or studied there, but marveled

at the Cold War normalcy
of children running circles
around the yard as if chased
by heat-seeking missiles,
then collapsing

in the shadow of the military satellite
shading the yard like a beach umbrella
while inside Grandma floured the table
to roll out a Crisco crust

and Grandpa peeled a Jonagold
in a single tight spiral, desperate
to carve away anything radioactive
from the sweet flesh inside.

---

When They Ask You

what you’ll name it you should lie. Say
something about chickens
             unhatched, a bloody speck
in a golden yolk. Say something
you can’t pronounce
                        alone, like a trinity
of little pulses beating as-one as-one as-one.
Say something you’d hang on the fridge
like an A-plus, magnetic poem, coupon
clipped for a half-price haircut. Say
             an almost-something, incanted
helium light on a gentle breeze. Say
a past something, echoed in a canyon,
             a wind-based haunting,
             tombstone-rubbing,
a great-great-great loop in time. Lie
but if you say it, when you say it,
it will feel like meeting again and again
                        for the very first time.

---

Regeneration

Your most terrible memory is a sea
of arms waving all together
 
like hair underwater. The arms
meaning something else. The sea, too.
 
The hair not a corpse’s but a mermaid’s.
This wasn’t the answer to my question
 
but the answer to a different one.
The bones of an arm are stronger
 
than a spine. The ridge of your wrist
can be a new vertebrae. The body
 
remembering it as a piece of its own.
In retrospect, this can’t be true.
 
The graft all wrong, the shape,
the push/pull of your muscles.
 
Though maybe what I mean to say
is that it’s possible. It’s possible to heal
 
all starfish-like, new arms waving
underwater. Maybe what I mean to say
 
is that these parts of you weren’t lost
but shed. Dropped into the sea bed
 
like a second boot. The terrible memory
of the moment just before or just after.
 
Your belly learning everything
a hand has known to do.




--
Alison Thumel is a Chicago-based poet, writer, and erasurist. Her work has recently appeared in DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, and Salt Hill. She is the author of LIFE OF, which won Salt Hill’s Dead Lake Chapbook Contest in 2016.