7.06 What Holds
Ashley Dailey
Paper, ceramic bowl, and metal spoon
+Text
What Holds
bones
my mother
says
her sister
looks
like
bones
like:
the wrong
word
she
means:
my aunt
is now
mostly
bones
before
she
was
mostly
something
else
her creamy
watermelon-
flavored
girliness:
last
to go
then
hip-huggers
shook
loose
(she
tucked
them
into
a trash
bag
of hand-
me-
downs
for me)
her
teeth
grew
brittle
her
smile
emptied:
ritual
meeting
reality
…
when
I
stopped
eating
breakfast
my mother
said
I
was
dis-
app-
ear-
ing
(like
she
did)
my mother
had seen
bones
once
a person
has seen
bones
she
knows
they
secretly
hold up
everything
(everything)
else
rickety
knee’d
calves
houses
and inside
houses—
the people
gathered
around
breakfast
tables
Process:
While thinking about Leave Some Room, I found myself obsessing over the cows' hooves, the bone-colored body, and the tall thin shape—and especially the ominous, coiling wire that wraps around nose-like protrusions. Considering the piece alongside the issue theme of cream, I thought about milk; breakfast; and, growing up, my aunt's pasture full of cows. What resulted was an associative kind of poem coiled tight around a spoon. The poem is concerned with what makes up and sustains the body and with the legacies women pass to girls.
—Ashley Dailey
+Bio
Ashley Dailey is a writer and multimedia artist from Sargent, Georgia. She mostly writes about family and the cultural legacies of the American South. Her work has received support from the Academy of American Poets and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is published or forthcoming in Sonora Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waxwing, among others. She received her MFA from the University of Tennessee and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
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