Made in China and Phebus Etienne

I'm running into these domestic literary songs a lot these days -- once you start looking it never ends. Here's a great article I read in the UCSD alumni mag about Sara Bongiorni and her family who tried to live for a year without buying anything "Made in China" -- I'm sure that was very laundry challenging.

"I worry about human rights and the hardships of Chinese factory life, but it was too late to think we could solve those problems by pushing China away."

She wrote a whole book and told her story on TV. I could try that with my laundry problems.

Here's a poem I read this morning in a Autumn 2006 volume of "The Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets." I am way behind with my journals. The poem is by Phebus Etienne, an emerging (emerged) Haitian-American poet who published her first (only) book Chainstitching in 2006 -- the title poem of that collection, "Chainstitching" belongs at the top of my laundry songs list -- and as I've been looking around the internet today to find a copy of it (retyping lazy about I am) I learn that she is dead.

Only 41 years old, only one book of poems. (Strange that even though AAP published her poems in their journal in 2006, one can no longer find her mentioned on the AAP website -- I had to go to poetryfoundation.org to locate her obituary.) The most information about this poet can be found at Cave Canem's website, and all over the blogosphere (is that spelled right?).

CHAINSTITCHING

After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath, I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn’t conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, “We have to do something about this.”

She hasn’t visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn’t remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.

Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother’s Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.

Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother’s grace,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor’s gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me,
sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.