By Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
Why did she push the child
down down in the bath
and hold her there in a womb of scalding heat
to thrash like a fish O why her own,
her first-born bound as the faucet’s silver mouth
gushed with sounds she couldn’t hear?
The mother, entombed in her deaf water,
let go at last and the girl, dripping, mute with fear,
arose, to be drawn naked into her mother’s
remorseful, terrifying arms.
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is Arkansas’s eighth poet laureate. She is the author of Flying Yellow: New and Selected Poems, named a semi-finalist in the 2022 North American Book Award of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Other books are What a Light Thing, This Stone; two chapbooks, Hungry Foxes and Weather of the House, and two books of lyrical prose, A Welcome Shore and Sketches of Home. Her poems have appeared in many journals, books, and anthologies such as Mid/South Anthology, Slant, Shenandoah, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Century, Words and Quilts, and others. Awards include nominations for the Pushcart prize, first place in the Dr. Lily Peter Memorial Award, first place in the Virginia Highlands Creative Writing Contest, and others. A retired college professor, she lives in Fayetteville and teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia.