Poem-a-Day - "Mentor" by Rachel McKibbens

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May 19, 2023 

Mentor

Rachel McKibbens
           “death cannot harm me
            more than you have harmed me,
            my beloved life.”
                       
Louise Glück 

I tell my daughter first, because her knowing  
forces it to become true. I have to leave dad.  

Nothing is going to change. She nods  
like a priest in a booth, the last fifteen years

staring down at us. Explains, softly, 
how she’s spoken of me to her therapist.

Her worry of becoming my mirror. Tells me, 
I remember you, mom, before him. You were happy.

Oh. Oh. To surrender to your death by someone else’s
hand is still a kind of suicide. Slower. I stand naked

on the porch as she recounts in perfect detail,
(in a poet’s detail) the very things I’d hoped

to disguise. My careful little spectator. Diligent neighbor 
to my unnamed agonies. It is not ungrateful to resist

the tyrannies of obsession. It is no selfish act 
to want, suddenly, to stay alive. My dear girl.

She is teaching and I am learning. I not only  
want to be seen, I want to be seen through.

I return to my house, haunted and waiting. 
I look into the mirror and notice the door.

Copyright © 2023 by Rachel McKibbens. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 19, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem was written several months after ending a long-term relationship. Poetry has always been a tool for me to shoulder my way out of an emotional trench. So many writers who came before me have unknowingly become my surrogate guides. Having grown up in a chaotic household, there was never a blueprint for grace or forgiveness or the simple acknowledgment of a difficult subject. ‘Mentor’ is about recognizing the transformative shift between a parent and their adult child, where stating something plainly is the best option, and listening closely is the best escape plan. This poem is for anyone looking for permission to get free.”
Rachel McKibbens

Rachel McKibbens

Rachel McKibbens is a queer Chicana poet and the author of the collections blud (Copper Canyon, 2017), Into the Dark & Emptying Field (Small Doggies Press, 2013), and Pink Elephant, to be re-released by Button Poetry. In 2012, McKibbens founded The Pink Door Writing Retreat, an annual retreat held exclusively for non-men writers of color. 

blud

blud
(Copper Canyon Press, 2017) 

 


“A water woman has no body” by Lisa Ciccarello
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“The Imperishable and Perishable Family” by Prageeta Sharma
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Thanks to Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Nguyen’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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