Underdeveloped
You said I was developing, Mother,
so you took me to buy my first bra,
confessing you had always felt flat-
chested, underdeveloped.
The department they called “Foundations”
sat in the middle of the store,
so everyone could see
a young girl fingering the lace.
How I longed to slip behind the slips,
disappear beneath the girdles and hose.
In the dressing room, you sat on the bench
while the clerk measured, kindly, delicate,
with her tape around my bare chest.
I cringed, too mortified even
to meet your eyes.
Now you are mortified, measured and fitted,
entrenched in the foundations.
Today I strain to find you where you live,
to fix your features. The old Polaroids
developed on their own, humming
out of that squat box, the image
a ghost at first until you waved your hand
and the picture deepened in color, clarity,
flushed to life.
But your face pales, recedes,
undevelops. You fade, blanch and blur.
With a buzz and whir, you withdraw again
into the narrow slot of the camera obscura.
This poem is from the book Dead Language by Jeanne Emmons (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/dead-language-by-jeanne-emmons/
Dead Language chronicles the journey of a daughter searching for her mother in the underworld of grief. As the poet wanders, she encounters memories as well as features of the imagined underworlds of Homer, Vergil, Dante, Hieronymous Bosch, Lewis Carroll and others. These form a psychological landscape of mixed emotions: disorientation, guilt, gratitude, regret, longing, depression, resignation. The poet struggles to find a language adequate to comprehend and “compose” the mother, a Latin teacher who refused to use the term “dead language,” insisting the ancient tongue lived on. Finally, the poet emerges from the underworld, acknowledging that her mother, like the dead language, is embedded in the etymology of the living.
Jeanne Emmons has published four previous collections of poetry: The Red Canoe (Finishing Line Press); The Glove of the World, winner of the Backwaters Press Reader’s Choice Award; Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press); and Rootbound, winner of the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices Competition. She received her PhD in English from The University of Texas. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Poet Lore; Prairie Schooner, River Styx, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Xavier Review, and many other journals. She is the former poetry editor of The Briar Cliff Review. She lives on a lake in South Dakota with her husband and cat.
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