Plastic Cookie by Cate Marvin

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 12, 2015   Plastic Cookie   Cate Marvin

Like a teapot, I’m tipped to spill from my kettle snout some silver tears, these few drops that glow and drip   their arrows down into the ground from off my eyes and nose. I was going to send back the plastic cookie   fallen from your daughter’s false stove, her pretend kitchenette, into the net compartment that opens up   beneath my daughter’s stroller when its pink flower is broken open, which I discovered upon landing in   Newark, to push my nervy daughter along bright airport corridors so that we might be reunited with   our luggage. My orange suitcase pops its atrocity out from that mystery mouth that spills onto the metallic   fins that spool around, and I run to clutch at it, heave its weight. Yet, just yesterday, it sat fat in your room,   contents sprung: underwear, diapers. The both of us fearful for our respective daughters, too deep, perhaps,   in love with our singular daughters, drinking late into the night, speaking of our daughters. Earlier, furious   your fearsome daughter pulled her entire plastic kitchen down, crashed it to the floor, as if toppling a bookshelf   with the simple tug of a hand. Daughters astonishing daughters! Mine with her dish-wash hair, plate eyes   full of gray-blues, wanting to play with your daughter’s stove, the plastic kettles, tea cups. Still little, wobbling   all over the room. Then dusk sat its fat ass down at last. To our great relief, we found our daughters deep asleep,   and were free to drink the rum of us, which was, as it always had been, a gradual drink. And you know what   you know with your hands, wish the night blacker since blackest is forever. Who’d believe I’d be dropping such   bells of tears now, to hear them ring inside the earth that absorbs them? Let us not hand down this history to our   daughters. Let’s ignore what a plastic cookie means to us, or for that matter why your daughter had one in the first   place. Forget your daughter’s pale glare in that doorway’s 3 a.m.: innocent us lying underneath and atop one another   on your lousy futon. Denier, liar, totem. You’d given me a plastic cookie. No. You and your daughter gave me and   my daughter a plastic cookie. You cannot now comfort me. So disown me. The soil is free. Within it lives all that matters.   One day, I’ll see you down there. Daughter-free.            Copyright © 2015 by Cate Marvin. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This is a poem about the metaphoric value of objects as they travel from one context into another. In its original setting, the object seems innocuous enough. Freshly examined, its symbolism seems so weighty as to be obvious.” —Cate Marvin   Cate Marvin is the author of Oracle (W. W. Norton, 2015). She teaches at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and lives in Maplewood, New Jersey. Most Recent Book by Marvin   Oracle (W. W. Norton, 2015) "To My Daughter" by Hyam Plutzik "?" by Randall Mann "The Language of the Birds" by Richard Siken Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038