Tara Westmor

mothers

the way a world reworlds: one moment
a mother breathing and in another
“the city still here somehow” my mother says without

the city still my mother’s city, Midwestern broken
window catastrophe, ghosts of the Wright Brothers
hovering in front of their statue’s permanence

her mother had loved it here had changed
a small piece an activist my mother’s mother
had small sayings about womanhood could become anything

we wanted: lawyer, war monger, nun
and my mother says when she was young she didn’t
couldn’t know what she might become

a mother, a pacifist, she too couldn’t stand a war
but she made wars put the pieces of wars together
counted up “bullets and jet fuel,” she says.

organized the armored vehicles, the rifles. “it’s okay I’m still” a mother
it must feel so good to count what can kill her
what can and won’t what still exists, war, with or without her mother.

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Tara Westmor is an anthropologist poet, raised in Dayton, Ohio. She received her MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University and is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California-Riverside. She has work published and forthcoming in Water~Stone Review, Muzzle, The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, The Sink Review and elsewhere.