poetry on mamazine:

Grandchild
by Terri Taylor Weiner

Hard Scrabble
by Rick Chamberlin

Rooting
by Tonya Ward Singer

Resting State (for my mother)
by Rafaella Del Bourgo

Mom With Headache Lets Son Drive to School
by Rochelle Ratner

Songs I Used to Get in My Head All Day and Songs I Get in My Head All Day Now That I Am a Mother
by Jessy Randall

Folding Laundry
by Theresa McCourt

Daughter's Gnashing of Teeth
by Maureen Tolman Flannery

Firstborn
by Sally Goade

My Mother's Closets
by Sally Goade


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POETRY

Daughter's Gnashing of Teeth
by Maureen Tolman Flannery

She goes to sleep in what seems like peace
with a candle and the nightly litany of divine
blessing dispersed across her world like spring green.

But there are lurking hurts and grand injustices
waiting to land in her night psyche
somewhere between her dreams and dawn.

Then begins this gesture of displeasure
with what is--the gnashing of teeth.
She becomes a millstone, metate, a mortar and pestle.

She grinds unkindness to a fine powder of filial feeling,
and reduces lies to their phonemes of primal truth.
The seeds of her own quick anger are ground down

to flour for the bread of resolve. She wakes
with a stiff neck, her jaw set in its pressing,
building muscles used for speaking hard truths.


Maureen Tolman Flannery's Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher's Daughter was nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Although she grew up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband Dan raised their four children in Chicago. A Fine Line was also published this year and produced as musical theatre. Her other books are Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico; Remembered Into Life; and the anthology Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places. Her work has appeared in forty anthologies and over a hundred literary reviews, recently including Midwest Quarterly Review, Amherst Review, Calyx, Atlanta Review, and Margin.