My Mother's Farmland: Thirteen Acres Square by Emily J. MacIntyre

The land was grass in all directions     grass and mesquite trees     grass that hid Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes. One summer we gathered them     all     in a triumphant bundle of blue and white, red and orange. Our faces streaked with     red Texas clay    we proudly presented the fruits of our harvest to our mother.

She cried. She cried over the blooms through a smile. She smiled because we loved her, she cried because    we broke the cycle of flower from seed to root     and they would never grow again. Her laugh lines crinkled with sorrow as she gave us instructions on drying and extracting their ink. 

Thirteen magical acres of     space         imprisoned the small house inside miles of waving grass. Wispy salt-and-pepper hair pulled under a scarf, she dug her paint-stained fingers into red soil and coaxed her dream garden into life, a half-acre wide with melons, strawberries, zucchini, corn. 

In her     mind’s eye     the artist sketched out her farm: chickens, horses and goats. 

Her best friend died    in the middle of the night     we picked up the pretty girl I had grown up with, played with, fought with. I was sad my friend had lost her mom    I didn’t see     my mother’s best friend had left the earth. Her confident, the woman she walked with, shared trauma, everyday-ness        gone. 

She had watched her friend     glow translucent     as cancer ate her brain. She disappeared into the tall grass where my mother could not follow. We never knew - a mother hides her pain. 

Her fingers bled charcoal, brightly colored chalk, and     silence      as she watched her children grow. 

Then came the day cancer took my mother by the hand and led her where I could not follow. My confidante walked into the tall grass until         she vanished         obscured by the thorns of the mesquite. Her beauty swallowed by the land that had long ago staked a claim on her soul. 
It swallowed us all, grassy farmland dotted with mesquite trees and tears    a broken cycle        hearts pulled out by the root unable to go to seed.

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Emily MacIntyre is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at Mississippi University for Women, focusing on poetry, non-fiction and playwriting. She holds a BA in Theatre from California Lutheran University. Emily works as free-lance stage manager in Denver Colorado and is a Guest Artist for the Stagecraft department at Denver School of the Arts. Her passion projects are realizing story to stage as a poet/spoken word artist and creating hybrid work across genres.