You tell a child hold it, and they do.

Today, the therapist talks about wisdom and grief,
I think about abstracts as bladders,
full and sloshing, sometimes warm,
almost always animal skin,

I envision my mother and I
inside of one of these,
which a lesser therapist may call
a womb–I am not certain
about the quality of this therapist.

I only know I hear her
windows are open, that the weather must be warm
by way of how the birds are chirping–I do not tell her

my favorite memory with my mother is driving through a warm night
listening to Dido, how the night follows the curving hills and the valley
below is full of starlight.

I do not tell her this simple child’s memory because I am embarrassed
about calling the city lights stars, but because the memory comes
after my mother picks me up

from babysitting another family’s children.
A family with a ranch house
and a horse and a mother and a father.
A mother and a father who disappear
only a few nights a month,
and always come home
in time to kiss their children goodnight–
happy children in a happy home
who see my mother more often
than I see her,
as special, as kind,
and they miss her too,

but not how I do, they might still remember her
as the beautiful girl with blonde hair
who, I imagine,
would race across their terracotta
patio and teach them how to swim.

I can only remember that road returning her to me,
how the car lights lit one turn

and how I held my breath afraid she wouldn’t
turn the wheel soon enough to light the next.

Ashley Bockholdt is a Filipina American poet with a vested interest in disruption and hybrid forms as a means of navigating the world in a disabled, “othered” body. She is a graduate of Rutgers University–Newark’s MFA poetry program and resides in Newark, where she aims to make friends with the big mice.

This poem was selected by September poetry curator Leslie McIntosh, who writes: “Elizabeth Bishop says, ‘Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?’ in her poem, Questions of Travel. The impasse of yearning Bishop paints might be an inspiration for Bockholdt’s serpentine form. It enacts the elusiveness of the record contained within the self. The poem descends hypnotically into the depths of memory, held together by the long, sweeping sentences of a voice stretched in its reaching toward a beloved not quite lost, yet absent.”

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