Mother Giant

Peri Fae Blomquist

Each dawn        
she eats the yard clean of
last night’s howls.
Opens her mouth and tucks in the
devils and the undead,
all the barrow-hearts who crawled up the hill
from town
after losing their livelihoods in a poker game.
 
Out of tenderness she swallows
the white-picket remains of children
who didn’t make it to her door
(small souls
with small-mouthed mothers
who had stomachs too withered for cleaning.)
By now she isn’t hungry,
but she can’t very well leave the poor darlings
lying cold and alone in the mud.
 
Her own children rise while she waters the garden
(spinning thread from the fog
to weave rainclouds over the vegetable patch.)
They bring the sun
bobbing behind them like a balloon,
avalanche feet rumbling through the kitchen
and out,
carving, and flattening, and rearranging
the landscape;
leaving the house an empty socket in their wake.

Now there are games she must play:
Hiding games, to help them learn the difference
between empty places
and hollow ones,
Chasing games, to strengthen the fifth chamber
in the heart
where their fear will live someday,
Killing games,
to teach them the reasons 
they play.

When they grow hungry,
crowding around all wilted and weak,
she feeds them only wholesome things.
Their stomachs are still too tender
for monsters and dreams,
and even if she has to teach them
the art of dying last
she would rather they not know
the rubber taste of vampire wings,
or the rotten, watery flavor of ghouls . . .
 
not yet.

For the hush of the day she rests,
until the afternoon slides exhausted
down the mountain,
and the shadows start to look like
restless appetites.
Then she untethers the rainclouds
and gathers her young earthquakes
to the house,
soothing them back into their skins
so they may be kissed
and sent to bed.
 
Through the night,
Mother Giant stands in the kitchen
holding up the roof against the massive dark,
palms flat against old oak beams,
leaking pipes like curlers in her hair.
 

 

Peri Fae Blomquist lives in Boston with her partner and a sleepy feline named Peanut. She spends her weekdays blending in to the average human lifestyle, and her weekends attempting various projects she has not thought through all the way. She would stop writing and get a social life, but then the stories would keep her up at night.

About “Mother Giant,” she shares, “There was no single catalyst for the birth of this poem. It began as a lonely stanza on my phone, which I finished half by accident. I was considering all the badass mothers I know, most of whom have raised or are raising a family under difficult circumstances, and I found myself thinking, ‘This is what they are like.’”

 

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