Tracy Royce
The Summer Before My Mother Descended into Psychosis
I worried about my hair.
It had always been thick, lustrous,
and best of all, attached.
Then I found clumps clogging the drain
and my comb came away kinky.
My part grew ever wider,
a strip of pallid scalp exposed.
“Bald is sexy,” my husband joked,
pointing at his vacant pate.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a bald woman,”
I said, stooping to gather the strands
strewn across the bathroom floor.
What, I thought, could be worse than that?
What the Books Don’t Tell You
After Mom receives the diagnosis, you read the books, attend the lectures, learn everything you can about dementia. You discover that memory isn’t the only casualty of the disease ravaging your mother’s brain. Cognition, balance, even the ability to swallow will eventually decline. But no one warns you about the animals. That someday soon, you’ll be unable to soothe Mom when she tearfully insists someone has snuck in and drowned several kittens in her sink. That she’ll mourn her babies, also imaginary, whom she thinks have been abducted and torn apart by wolves. That when your frantic mother believes a tiger has killed your brother, your sister-in-law will refuse to put him on the phone to provide reassurance. That after years of this, you will gaze at the reflection of your sunken eyes and sallow skin and wonder just what kind of creature you yourself have become.
Note: An earlier version of this poem was featured on the Brevity Podcast Episode #10: “One-Minute Memoir” (2018).
By the Side of the Road
If we’re to believe the billboard, the beaming blonde used to weigh more, before her procedure, her transformation. Now her arms are raised in victory, a slender celebration of her triumph over the scale. As we approach the intersection, you see her, then turn to me with hungry eyes—perhaps I too can be tamed, whittled away, made to take up less space in the world. I hit the accelerator, blowing past the billboard, imagining you too are behind me.
Tracy Royce is a fat-positive poet and writer whose work has appeared in / is forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review, The Fat Studies Reader (NYU Press), MacQueen's Quinterly, ONE ART, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies.
