Allisa Cherry

Poetry

Allisa Cherry’s poetry has recently appeared in The Maine Review, Nine Mile Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Rust + Moth, The Columbia Review, High Desert Journal, and The Account, and has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she completed her MFA at Pacific University, teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the United States, and is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.

 

My Mother’s Cold Hands

—layered one over the other—netted me like a rabbit beside her undressed body laid out in the funeral home. Skin almost translucent, nails bluing at the cuticle. Long and keen those fingers that used to unravel my knotted hair and more than once pinioned me by my wrist or pinched the flesh of my thigh when I had gone too far. Nobody told me in advance how blood pools once the machinery of the heart stops. Nobody warned me that purple would bloom across her back like lilac bundles. I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of it all. Her lineless face. Her utter stillness. And her hands —the only ones I trusted near me as I labored my daughter into this life— hadn’t they always looked just like this? A matrix of silence. A cairn of milky stones.

“ I wrote this poem for a workshop on writing elegies shortly after my mother died. I found when tasked to write about the magnitude of such a loss it was only manageable if I narrowed my focus to singular moments or details. I generally work in very tight lines with little or no white space, but I felt this particular subject deserved breath and light and slowness, which is how it found its form. ”

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