When I Was Twelve, My Mother Gave Me Bookplates
Hope is the thing with feathers-
Emily Dickinson
I walked three blocks to the Rexall
Drugstore to spin the dancer-slim
gift-book rack, touching all the spines
as they reeled by. The Rexall regulars
floated side by side on their barstools,
ate half-moons of tuna from thick
white plates, slurped fizzy drinks
called phosphate floats, bright
as butterflies. Like an orchestra
conductor, the pharmacist stood above
us all, counting the pills. No one told me
that the slender Hallmark gift-books
were for ladies to give other ladies –
the beauty of those books both card
and gift. I chose one with a jungle-green
dust cover, the poems alive inside
like swarms of bees. Who knew
that sixty pages could be as big
as a house, a pollinator garden
outside every window. I wandered
the book’s rooms all night opening
drawers, fingering lace tablecloths,
reading hand-written letters and
their secrets, petals in my mouth.
Inside the verdant cover, I pasted
a blank nameplate, a gift from my mother –
an ordinary woman but for her hair
as red as a hummingbird’s breast,
and her voice, a sweet soprano.
I don’t remember how I learned
who Emily was, or when her feathered
lines first darted around my room.
No one told me then that Emily loved
a woman as much as she loved the world.
Or how my mother knew
that if you loved something enough,
it was fine to take out your best pen
and write your name on it.
Luci Huhn’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, SWWIM, Leon Literary Review, Rattle, and South Florida Poetry Review, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Awards. Her chapbook, The Years That Come After, was printed by Breakwater Press. She lives and writes in Southwest Michigan.
