My Mother Was a Tele-skate Girl

In the shady pink of a growling dog’s throat
beneath teeth like stalactites: I was born and banished
between two thumps of a tail.
Adopted out at birth,
my new folks adored me
though                I never softened
their families, Presbyterians perturbed
by a crow-haired infant, filthy
with strangers’ blood.

Later in life aunties felt shame admitting
they'd never picked me up when I cried,
they hadn’t dared
                  touch me.
But my mother held me.
My mother was
a tele-skate girl who worked night shifts at Ma Bell
on roller skates, flashing
from one end         of the switchboard
to the other, connecting people.
This is my favorite memory of her,
though it happened                 long before
my birth, before my father, before
his cancer and his dying while
I sat alone
on the hospital lawn,
not yet six.

Her cancer
sunk
into soft pink spots, first inhabited by
chewing tobacco.           Doctors planted
uranium seeds beneath her
tongue. Her jaw
disintegrated.
She’d had time to tell me
almost nothing.               They cut
my mother’s tongue out, her cooking
got lousy   I never heard her voice again, my mother’s
             voice, no
jokes, no help with homework.

She sent me her photo
when I was stuck
in Vietnam, she was grinning wide
in a pretty grey dress, one hand
on the wheel of a    white convertible
a friend let her pretend was ours,        the other clutching
a bottle of Vodka I knew
belonged to us.

Miah Arnold wrote the novel Sweet Land of Bigamy, the 2014 Best American Essay selection “You Owe Me,” and she is finishing up a book of poetry. Though raised in rural Utah, she has lived in Houston, Texas, for the last thirty years. She is the founder and principal of Grackle and Grackle Writing Workshops, where she makes it possible for anybody who wants to take a writing class to take one with the best teaching writers from Houston and around the country.