Broken –
I belong to a small group of women called Creative Spirits. We get together on Zoom each Friday for two hours of art-making. Today’s host tasked us with writing about our brokenness. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with anything in the last half-century, lol, so I reached into my childhood and teens. This is Part 1.
I wrote this poem in probably 1976, four years removed from the incident. I was in a small writing seminar with Adrienne Rich at Douglass College, and she helped me edit it, using her purple Flair to bracket out syllables that didn’t belong and to cross out what had been the superfluous last line. I think I still have the original onion-skin pages, possibly a few drafts stapled together. I can still see them in my mind.
Broken
Dishes smashed on the floor:
triangles and half-moons.
Gold-rimmed white china
reflects fluorescent kitchen light.
He’s home drunk again,
stumbles from front door to bedroom,
oblivious to her curses
as each dish hits the floor and breaks.
Flinging each dish at the wall,
watching it shatter to the floor,
she hates him
for his routine,
for her waiting
for years
in dark kitchens.
He goes to sleep,
still in work clothes.
She sits at the table and cries.
Best china in shards on the floor,
best years ground
like glass
beneath his feet.
The sharp edges gleam.
I witnessed this at age 17, standing in the darkened hallway just outside the kitchen. He’d probably been gone a couple days; we’d had the usual nights, my mother and I, where she kept the house dark and stood at the kitchen window watching for his headlights.
Back then, senior year of a new high school on split sessions, the bus would drop me off just after noon at the stop a few doors down from the white, one-story duplex where we lived on the Army base. The bus would go past our driveway, and if I saw my father’s car, I could relax. He’d be home for lunch as usual, and the house was more likely to be safe to enter. I could breathe. But if his car wasn’t there, he was off on a bender. I didn’t know what I might be walking into.
My mother’s depressive rage was a given.
I’d seen a lot in my life. I’d absorbed that rage into my flesh on many occasions, though not since I was sixteen. Still, it shocked me to see the violence of an entire set of dishes – all those place settings of dinner plates, soup bowls, dessert plates, saucers, cups – slamming and shattering against the tile kitchen floor. We didn’t have much money. For all I remember, these could have included the dishes that came, one at a time, in the large box of laundry detergent. As a child, I pulled each new one out of the box, little white powder-crystals clinging to the porcelain.
Whatever the actual value or lack thereof, these were our best dishes, saved for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I cleaned up the mess. Taking deep breaths. Ears keeping watch for any sound that said my mother might bring her rage into the kitchen again. There was nothing left in there but me.
