Poems

JULIET GELFMAN-RANDAZZO
my mother’s mother was born one hundred years ago today

i am teasing my body along one thin line ° the drive between a city of nestling ° and one of conscious itch ° i hope my perambulator ° will pass its inspection ° sometimes a person ° is holding a thing that turns out to be a baby ° sometimes a mother is pregnant for ten months ° not nine and that’s normal, just the way it is ° on days like these my body carries ° a laptop atop a laptop atop a lap ° i don’t prefer to feel ° a bit lost this way ° in the depths of a place called a garden ° i am caroling for nothing ° a return of my saturn ° the advice i provided my mother ° was to intern ° her mother’s ashes ° in the veteran’s cemetery ° it’ll be there forever i said ° and something can always occur to an urn ° what did i mean by that rolling silence ° the photo she held up to graph myself onto ° looked so much like her it aches ° no no i look like that twelve year old girl ° a great great great something ° those moonfisted eyes that beakish pout ° i don’t recognize my own voice ° my mother tells me ° maybe i was high ° in those letters she is twelve and in this one thirty ° but the handwriting barely tilts ° i recognize her voice in mine sometimes ° a mother atop a mother atop a moth ° we flutter this way or that instead ° the baby in the perambulator twitching ° i have sipped the last of the coffee ° i’m so sorry to call again ° but when you didn’t answer ° i forgot my voice was meant to ° i mean i lost the sound ° of the letter ° i love you mom so much ° more than i can say ° you are just the best ° she wrote ° a sign off care to take ° well ° here you go then ° i’m passing the letters ° right back to you

Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo lives in Philadelphia, where she curates the reading series Spit Poetry. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks “Heehee” (Ursus Americanus Press, 2025) and “DUH” (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and her work appears or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Offing, The Rumpus, antiphony journal, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught.