Poetry By Ann Chinnis
The Struggle Here
isn’t the sea–
swift as loss–
or the coral reef
fighting the sea’s
intrusion.
It’s not from the coconut palms,
their hollow fruits
& brown fronds
singing an end.
No, it’s the hermit crabs.
As I sit on the beach,
one looks at me sideways
with two fat,
stalked eyeballs. It lugs
a home scrubbed
of color, cracked
through its vertical
helix.
On this beach, refuge
for the stubborn,
the hermit crab scribbles
a message in the sand
I can’t read,
but it seems to be telling me
something—
about its hand-me-down
shell,
about growing old.
This headstrong survivor. But now,
the sky
is streaked with orange,
and my wife yells over the waves,
“Annie, look up.”
Disdaining Her Apron
and “The Joy of Cooking”, my mother
nudged a champagne flute
from the top shelf of the china cabinet,
filled it halfway with Perrier and Jouet
and tendered it to me, whispering
into my ponytail, “Every twelve-year-old girl
should learn how to hold her liquor.”
That New Year’s Eve, we drank
to ’68, to change, to Gloria Steinem,
to each other. I was giddy from the fragile
rim that curved towards my
teeth, from the bubbles’ surprise,
from the suspense of fizz.
When I toasted my mother
for the fourth or fifth time,
I shattered the flutes in our hands.
We rang in the New Year
on our knees–laughing, plucking shards
off the counter, mopping the floor.
You could run through our house
in white socks, and the floors
would be blameless. You could nab
Cinnamon on the spice rack
between Bay Leaves and Cumin. You would
surprise my mother’s Dixie Cups
of vodka behind the manual Smith-Corona
in her attic office, where she edited
the Phi Beta Kappa Quarterly. My mother
was the same age as Anne Sexton, author
of “To Bedlam and Part Way Back”.
“There is no map,”
Anne wrote. Time travel across the lexicon
of a mother’s psyche: Bedlam
for a mental hospital in London,
an archaic diagnosis,
the abyss of an accomplished woman. Did
my mother experience bedlam
as Anne did—a locked room
disguised as ambition’s cure?
Six years later, Anne Sexton was dead,
and my mother, sick of drinking,
committed herself to the “The Institute for Living”.
I drove from med school
each weekend to visit—my car door
closing like a New Year’s Eve toast
to the sweet resolve
of our thin flutes clinking.
