Lineage by Kathleen McGookey

Photo by Alex Shu via Unsplash

Who told you that your mother used to balance upside down on one hand on a stepladder in the backyard? Did she learn at circus camp or teach herself? Do any pictures survive? How about when she spun plates on a broom handle or juggled eggs? Who taught her to sail? Did she call her sailboat The Rebel or did that name come with the boat? Who watched her bring that boat screaming into shore, then jump in the lake to swing it around? Is one observer still alive with that memory intact, but forgotten until now? You had climbed the crabapple to watch honeybees rummage in the petals. Did your mother’s mother give her a McCall’s cookbook with a yellow cover, and write inside that being a good cook is one of the finest attributes of a good wife and mother? Did she read that and think twice? What choice did anyone have? Why do you, even now, know exactly where to find that book? When your mother was happy, did she walk on her hands up one flight of stairs, or was that her granddaughter, the one she never met, who arrived years after she died? Did only one girl perform this feat, or could they both?

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Kathleen McGookey’s most recent book is Paper Sky (Press 53). Her work has appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, December, Epoch, Field, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs. It has also been featured on American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, SWWIM Every Day, and Verse Daily. She lives in Middleville, Michigan.​