My Mother’s Fear

My mother’s fear, always at a simmer, is holy.
I feel her uneven breath from fifty feet away,
her panicked whisper trembles the earth.
Holy is my mother, who threatens me with her mother’s
promise that she will be raped on the train if she falls asleep.
I worry my mother on the streets of Philadelphia at night; it excites me.
My mother’s eyes are bloodshot, green, watchful
as I traipse circles in our driveway pretending it’s a city block;
cars travel too fast up the hill for me to leave her sight.
Holy is my mother’s rage, a fury which raised her
from the aching ground of her mother, she hovers
over Vermont thickets, ringing her cowbell to ward off bears.
Holy her nightmares of antlers piercing the windshield, piercing me.
My mother’s stare is made of holy stone, her voice steady
in its recollection of my father stumbling drunk into traffic,
grasping my nine-year-old hand.
Praise my mother’s fear of her daughters, she knows
not what she bore. We scour the earth in search of danger
to confirm our girlhood suspicions
that the world is in fact holy, dangerous, and good.
Praise the empty stomach of my mother.
It’s only a matter of time before she forgoes eating at all.
Holy are my mother’s tears. Boiling over, astonishing and holy.
Holy is her quiver through the phone, probing me about the one time
my father pushed me, and where in the world she could have been.
Praise my mother, for her fear is everlasting, unrelenting,
feverish, holy and soft.

To the Girl Reading Tolstoy on the StairMaster

Have you noticed
your own romance
under the blue light
of the fitness center?
Your ponytail slick
with searching,
a pendulum
swinging upward.

What Is Art?
I have long sought
this reckoning, this fall
from reason-making,
this salt in the air.
Have you found
your answer yet?
I climb stairs and think
of you searching.

Perhaps it’s all art,
all of us reaching
into a murky lake
of experience,
clambering to the bottom
of our reconciling mind.

Perhaps you’ve found solace
here in this mud,
cradled and soaking
in reverie.

Mayzie Sattler (she/her) is a poet from Upstate New York. She is a second year MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College, where she serves as Poetry Editor for Lumina Journal and teaches for The Writing Institute. Mayzie has worked for Black Ocean and The Southampton Review, and is currently an intern for Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in Coffin Bell Journal and WILDsound Writing Festival. She currently lives, works, and studies in Yonkers, NY.