My Mother Named         

                                 after Ursula K. LeGuin

The molting goose, planted up
Slope of the lily pond
To wait out her grounded
Period. Six
Weeks the word
Of the Internet, a can
Of worms operating here as noise
We could hear from the deck the goose’s
Self-soothing clucks in companionable
Silence. She grazed like a sheep,
But self-aware, like a nanny,
A sign of intelligence in a mother
Nature poem.


My mother named her foolishly,
But in a nature poem, the goose is the fool
Of the feeling, we’ve all stepped in
Goose poop, some of us
Have even been sent sprawling.


What made my mother’s goose
Different? If she didn’t have a name


Would her fellows have been able to call
Down? They were passing
Low, but you couldn’t see
Their faces.
Their concern?


My mother’s concern tends
Toward unyielding. Every fallen
Fruit, native
Grass head in her garden
Has a name, the act
Of naming a betrayal of self
Awareness in the female of the species
A sign of fear, of shame.


My first full year of school was third grade,
Adam and Eve the first story
The teacher gave. Her name
Was Astrid, and I loved her till she crushed
A bee beneath her German heel later
In that originary California


Fall, the apple blood
Red, the serpent’s eye
Glinting a knowing green


And gold. How could the boys
Look at us the same way again?
When they set upon us
After school, screaming, Everything
Would have been free!
We added insult to injury by out
Running them across the brightening
(We made it so)
Field. We made it molten.

ξ

Kirstin Allio won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her new story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children, coming out in 2024. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc). Recent work is out or forthcoming in AGNI, Bennington Review, Changes Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Harp & Altar, The Hopkins Review, Interim, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Verseville, and elsewhere. Her awards and honors include fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She lives in Providence, RI.