Tuesday poem #489 : Angeline Schellenberg : Hunting for Red

 

 

 

Every July my mother tops my cake with fresh strawberries. I imagine I nearly slipped out there among the damp leaves. She assures me that, as a delivery room nurse she knew I would wait. Nine months pregnant, pulsing with contractions, but her mother-in-law wanted strawberries. An elderly 57, Oma could croon any child to sleep on her doughy belly; when she gave her own children orders, her voice shredded skin. Did any berries slip between my mother’s own lips? She could not have me until Oma’s pails were full. On a field one July morning, my tanned mother, our belly kissing the earth.

 

 

 

 

Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the Manitoba Book Award-winning Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), four poetry chapbooks, and the KOBZAR Book Award finalist Fields of Light and Stone (UAP, 2020). Her microfiction has appeared recently in Grey Sparrow Journal, SoFloPoJo, and Exposition Review. Angeline hosts Speaking Crow, Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic. She is currently training as a spiritual director.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan