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The Question of My Mother

By Robin Ekiss b. 1969 Robin Ekiss

The question of my mother is on the table.

The dark box of her mind is also there,

the garden of everywhere

we used to walk together.

Among the things the body doesn't know,

it is the dark box I return to most:

fallopian city engrained in memory,

ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum,

hinged lid forever bending back and forth —

open to me, then closed

like the petals of the paperwhite narcissus.

What would it take to make a city in me?

Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary

hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box

on the table: Mother, I am

out of my mind, spilling everywhere.

Source: Poetry (November 2007).

Biography

Robin Ekiss is the author of the poetry collection The Mansion of Happiness (2009). A resident of San Francisco, she received a 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Emerging Women Writers and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University. Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, VQR, TriQuarterly, and Best New Poets 2007 from Samovar Press.

Ekiss’s poems . . .

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