Cate McGowan
Mother Courage
“Wherever life has not died out / it staggers to its feet again.”
— Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
War-earned silence moves through
our house. All hope vanishes into closets.
The quiet drifts graceful as a canoe,
seaworthy, rotatable, but not overturned.
Soldiers’ apparitions haunt
our stairs—travel down, not up. And you
wear soft shoes on these hard floors.
On Sundays, you brush your blazer,
polish the brass buttons, an officer
with waxed whiskers.
I scrub the pots you brought me
from some far-off land, the copper sheen
of adventure dulled by tears.
Like a two-lane road or a traffic cop,
I’m out of my element here in this no-town.
Back in the city, I would awake
on garbage Wednesdays to men’s shouts,
to trucks burring and swallowing can-loads.
Outside now, along the cliff, a gale
rises. But God is not here, and you comb
your hair as you sit at my vanity.
The wick spits, and the light dies
as we push through evenings without
power, the tree limbs knocking, tapping
out three cheers for the troops.
— Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
War-earned silence moves through
our house. All hope vanishes into closets.
The quiet drifts graceful as a canoe,
seaworthy, rotatable, but not overturned.
Soldiers’ apparitions haunt
our stairs—travel down, not up. And you
wear soft shoes on these hard floors.
On Sundays, you brush your blazer,
polish the brass buttons, an officer
with waxed whiskers.
I scrub the pots you brought me
from some far-off land, the copper sheen
of adventure dulled by tears.
Like a two-lane road or a traffic cop,
I’m out of my element here in this no-town.
Back in the city, I would awake
on garbage Wednesdays to men’s shouts,
to trucks burring and swallowing can-loads.
Outside now, along the cliff, a gale
rises. But God is not here, and you comb
your hair as you sit at my vanity.
The wick spits, and the light dies
as we push through evenings without
power, the tree limbs knocking, tapping
out three cheers for the troops.
Biography
Cate McGowan is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Norton's Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Fat Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Barrelhouse, Shenandoah, Into the Void, Louisville Review, Atticus Review, Vestal Review, Unbroken, and elsewhere. A native Georgian, McGowan's an Assistant Fiction Editor for Pithead Chapel and is pursuing her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies. She won the 2014 Moon City Short Fiction Award for her debut short story collection, True Places Never Are, published in 2015, and her debut novel, These Lowly Objects, will appear in early 2020 from Gold Wake Press.
Website: https://www.catemcgowan.com/ Social media handles: |