Like a Handful of Pebbles
by Luther Hughes
Watching geese skim the river’s cheek,
I realize I never asked about her life before my birth.
I remember the vulgar green grass we slept on
in the park off 4th downtown, homeless, wish sandwiches
and Capri-Suns lazy between us. I remember the night
she flung glass mugs at my father as he ducked
into my godmother’s apartment. I remember throwing
a tantrum at Woodland Park Zoo. As a child, I’m told,
she ran to her grandmother’s house to get ahead
of the story after breaking my uncle’s nose.
They say, at 18, she told my visiting cousin
to be a lady or to go back home. I used to write,
she had told me, as I do now for you, who,
I’m sure, have your own history of remorse
and forgotten tales left in the backyard.
Listening to geese simp for bread, a mother
tells her son to hurry up or get left. On the other side,
another is told to pose. I’m redirecting, I know,
how grief pours into the mind like a handful of pebbles
into a river. I know I can’t sit all afternoon watching
the day detangle, the buttons of people sitting, standing,
drinking their matcha lattes, savoring the Spokane sun.
Everyone regrets something. A missed call. Too many shots
of Henny. An overpriced blouse sharpening its teeth
against your shoulders. A harmony you can’t,
for the blood of you, shake silent. There’s a song
she exhausted every morning that is now flexing
its muscle against the back of my mind. Any other time,
I’d sing it for you, gift the day my weeping,
but for now, the river inhales. The geese dip their beaks.
“Like a Handful of Pebbles” was written out of guilt. I was in Spokane for Get Lit! Festival, a literary festival in Spokane, WA. Over those four days, I was reading a lot of poems about lineage, parenthood/grandparenthood, childhood, and the overall connections we have with people. Several poems talked about the history of their parents and grandparents by way of conversation. I had realized, as the poem states, I’ve never even considered what my mom’s life was like before me. I knew some things pertaining to my dad, but nothing before they met.
The poem starts this way. With shame birthed a desperation to call important memories from my childhood that one could call “core memories.” And then, it moves beyond that to pull memories I heard my aunts and uncles talk about during her funeral—a fact I left out of the poem purposefully but speaks to this lack of interest and overwhelming shame.
It enacts the loneliness of my time in Spokane in this regard; mothers and their children all around me, people moving through the world without even knowing my mom was dead. I was moved to remove myself from this as evident in the poem: “I’m redirecting, I know, / how grief pours into the mind like a handful of pebbles / into a river.”
The final emotion I found myself harboring was regret. The relationship between regret, grief, and shame culminates in my mom’s favorite song, which I refuse to share with the reader; I wanted something that was mine, something that only I would know.
And then time moves on.
Luther Hughes is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves and the chapbook Touched. They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an online platform for queer writers of color, and co-host of The Poet Salon podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship, 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, and Cascade PBS’s Black Arts Legacies. Their writing has been published in The Paris Review, Orion, and The American Poetry Review. Hughes lives in Seattle.