When I walk into the bathroom, the small TV
on the counter speaks the 6 o’clock news
and my father is at the sink. I sit balanced
on the lip of the tub watching him,
like I did as a girl, run the razor across
his soft cheeks, over his Adam’s apple
along his jaw. He stands with his hands
on either side of the basin, tension silenced
in his shoulders as he leans toward the mirror.
I am memorizing the slope of his forehead,
the shape of his watch, imprinted on his wrist.
….
This poem first appeared in the Portland Review and is from the chapbook Simple Fact by Bronwen Butter Newcott (Finishing Line Press): https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/simple-fact-by-bronwen-butter-newcott/
In Simple Fact, Bronwen Newcott explores the intricacies of family over generations, “the daughter-mother-sun / rising on repeat.” The collection is a meditation between the seen and the unseen, the “simple fact” and “shadow between… fingers,” insisting that muscular love exists between the two. Newcott’s play forward and backwards in time allows mother and father to be specific, vocational, and archetypal at once. From a juicy orange dripping to the elbow, to the chalky scrim of loss that shadows a generation, Newcott’s poems seek “small sweet proof” that we are living.
Bronwen Butter Newcott was born and raised in Washington, DC and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Image, Poet Lore, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner and other journals. She is the author of Race to the Great Invention, her debut middle grade novel. Wild about the intersection between written and visual expression, Bronwen spends her time writing, speaking, and teaching art to kids and adults in Southern California where she lives with her family.
The Paddock Review 