~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Spencer Jewell

On Sundays, I Paint My Nails Purple to Summon My Mother

Dream her hands, overwintering

'cross wrought iron island where she halves 

dozens of plums, simmers lullabies on the stove

with nutmeg and earl grey sachets. Cedar table

where her teacup makes covenants of my palms,

2000 miles misplaced from a brick two-story

in Tennessee, her tidal-mouthed divinity. My mother

maintains a well-stocked tea cabinet and blizzard

hair. She is good rain. Sheet music. Sainthood.

Stringed instrument I can’t name. Dream her swanlike

over the sink, whispering lyrics into a cassette recorder

as I play pretend instruments. Dream a world

where the men don’t come back, and the only proof

she ever needs is a song. I lost my first guitar

in this unkempt kitchen—violent electric

neck I never clung to hard enough. My mother’s

past is a land that knows no honest ghosts.

She owns a house in south Mississippi, green

shutters and a yard so overgrown you could fall and

disappear. All through Hattiesburg, when her

gardenias bloom like lost gods, I listen to time:

aria of rain that makes fools of us all.

Spencer Jewell is a writer originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and an MFA candidate in poetry at LSU. She was a semi-finalist for the 2022 National Student Poets Program and received a National Silver Medal in Poetry from Scholastic. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Brink, Chestnut Review, Bluestem, Radar Poetry, Poetry South, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere.