Robin Rosen Chang: “Motherless, Eve”

Motherless, Eve

Motherless, Eve didn’t bear her mother’s burden—
depression, paranoia, nervous breakdown,

afternoons sleeping in,
bedroom curtains pulled tight.

She was never a last child
with a single mother finding herself

while her own hormones were surging,
breasts just beginning to round.

She didn’t have to endure her mother’s obsessions—
what a stranger or daughter said

or how she looked at her
that day. Or three years ago.

Or what will happen next week.
Or men. And men. A boyfriend

or more she never liked.
Or birds. Those birds turning

into a passion childlike in purity:
brown booby sightings; owls

like the ones she sculpted in clay menageries;
hawks sailing warm-air thermals;

mourning doves, the white-ribbon
edge of their tail feathers in flight.

Eve didn’t have a mother who’d worry about
the mallard too far from water,

who knew robins have such lovely songs.
There was no bush in front

of a kitchen window.
No four blue eggs.

Then hatchlings.
Eve didn’t grow up counting

the ways she didn’t want to be
like her mother.