“My Mother’s Silver Bowl”

“My mother, Bloody Mary, Mary Contrary, steps up to a podium, another dark wooden jobber with another college emblem on it.

When she speaks, my mother’s mouth won’t open all the way, straps of cords and muscle that you see, that you watch while they hold back her mouth, around her jaw and down to the dark red line around her neck, right where a choker necklace would sit.

My mother, beauty martyr, the face of progress.

You hear people cough across the lecture hall, the air’s that quiet, that still. People listen to my mother’s words, hard to hear sometimes with the ways her bottom lip won’t move under her teeth for the sound at the beginning of “phallocentric,” or pop the P sound at the beginning of “power dynamic.” The audience watches while my mother’s red face, always blood red, blooms redder under the stage lights.

My mother’s eyes, still the same blue, the blue from a peppermint gum package, the same blue as mine.

She tells it her way, about the night the sideshow started, the night she got free from her face.”