prosody

a poem about mothers, distance, and teenage years

This is one version of me from my teenage years. There were many, as teenage years often go.

If you would like this poem read to you, please click here:

Sixteen, 

cold feet on a scale
in the morning

scaled
and scared.

How the air was a
bright heavy rushing 
in the morning

the large coffee too strong

stinking gasoline rising from
the station grounds

as I fill up the car and 
some menfolk steal
sideways glances at me.

I hide behind the pump,

The click of the nozzle lock
holds my hand now,

a black leather belt with
purple, green, and yellow hearts
cradles my hips and

the red light on division 
street takes way too long

every metal-mouthed car face
staring me down.

my knees go weak on
the shop class stairs after
giving a quarter of my blood

but I don't
evaporate until I get
to the library. 

I go home a pale wraith
bleach the dark into
broken straw and decide to write my name

differently, the A rounding out
and my hips sharpening 

into keep away
games

wanting someone to warm
my cold body after the ditch 
accident, an electric
blanket.

-

quiet flutes nervously puff out pockets of
horizontal columnar air and I nearly pass
out again when lightning takes the field

hot sugar drop of nausea 
shaking and blood rushing out
of my heart to my feet 

I drive home and fall through
the bathroom door to the floor
lie next to the red popcorn 
puke bowl.

The tile spreads cool
on my flushed cheeks
and I sleep.


Where is my 
mother

ready to smooth

my hair, kiss my
cheek and braid

my words
into song

She who I speak with 
her fingerprint cadence, 

She who taught 
me to write my letters
half-cursive and would

be here to sing to 
me but I have asked her
to close her mouth

and left her for a 
town I am from but
was born nowhere near.

I visit her sometimes
at the pier, in the valley
of the mountains
I was born underneath. 

but at the end i always
leave her for the 

wild wheat fields,
my father's home

and the windbreak trees
where i can safely
hide.



E. Ashley Shain

---

Songs:

1. Daisy the Great - “The Record Player Song” (Audiotree Live Version)

I heard this song awhile back floating around on social media, but I absolutely love this version of it. It’s been stuck on my head on repeat the last few days since I heard it.

This song definitely inspired the above poem in this case.

2. The Shins - “Caring is Creepy”

If you were around in the 2000’s you will likely remember The Shins, as this song was featured in the movie Garden State at the time. I didn’t see Garden State until someone showed it to me my first year of college, but I had seen the like - Donnie Darko was popular at the time (and the music from it). I was a huge fan of the track “New Slang” at the time as well, not surprisingly.

I had encountered this album and listened to it over and over on my little iPod while bike riding in the country as a teen, but I didn’t know it was popularized by GS at the time. When I think of being a teen, I think of listening to The Shins, The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Format (the sort of precursor to the band fun.) and The Cure (an import from my older and cooler cousin in California). Those were the playlist to me being a very basic sad teenage girl working on her art or writing alone in my room and chugging way too much diet soda. But when I think of being a teen and starting to form my own musical choices and likes/dislikes, I think of being saved from my own loneliness and confusion by all of those sounds and words.

“Marching Bands of Manhattan” was another standout track for me at that age, with lyrics that promised I would one day feel better again:

I wish we could open our eyes
To see in all directions at the same time
Oh what a beautiful view
If you were never aware of what was around you
And it is true what you said
That I live like a hermit in my own head
But when the sun shines again
I'll pull the curtains and blinds to let the light in

The Chili Pepper’s song “Stadium Arcadium” did somethign similar for me at the time - with my favorite lines in the beginning of the quoted lyrics - it gave me a sense that all the too much I was dealing with at that age was somehow small in the grand scheme of things. I still think is an underrated track (or maybe it’s just my fierce love and attachment for this song - I’ve never heard anyone immediately name this as their go-to RHCP song):

Stranger things have happened both
Before and after noon (before and after noon)
[…]

Derelict days and the stereo plays
For the all night crowd that it cannot phase
And I'm calling

Tedious weeds that the media breeds
But the animal gets what the animal needs
And I'm sorry

I am finding some peace and understanding lately in recollecting my younger years from an adult perspective (as hard as some of it has been to recollect and integrate).

I hope you find some solace in the words or songs here, especially if you have had or do have a tenuous or confusing relationship with your own mother as a teen or an adult with the holiday coming up.

Take care of yourself,

Ashley (Po)

---

Thanks as always for stopping by to read and listen!

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