How to Know When Your Mother Lies, or the Everygirl’s Recipe For the Perfect Mint Julep

Kayla King

 

I.

Start with a memory and macerate

into the vessel of your choosing. Much prefer

the ornate orca etched into the side 

of your mother’s rocks glass. Recollect

her obsession with the ocean, but don’t

remind her that you dwelled with the dead

in a past life.

He told you so, as if telling were the same 

as siphoning the good bourbon 

from your father’s old bottle. Too dangerous,

even now. But your mother would never 

understand the revenant revival of childhood 

stories: sirens and sailors, 

damned and dying. 


II.

Disguise truth in the sugar froth for 

there’s a party to be had beyond the thistle, 

and a wingman waits in the weeds. But do not trust 

the world when it’s fleeced with geese 

down. You like to map 

hollows where a word finds

meaning. Favor the nip of nectar

to be taken from that place; to sip stories 

from skin, but speak not of their truths 

past daybreak.


III. 

Perhaps it’s the carnivorous creature of your past, 

which has since convinced you to consume 

with intention. Mother may I predict how we

will die? Such is a portension of a question 

you’ll never ask, because she’ll demand you buy bells 

to chime her aliveness. She’s promised before; 

she’ll never die. A lie, you tell him. Recite 

the recipe as you see fit. And you’ll make a julep 

the only way you know how. Sometime before bourbon 

and crushed ice and stirring, mothers teach daughters 

to know when they’re drunk enough. 

However, those kinds of women never instruct 

on the aching quake-spun sorrow of loss.

Those days when mothers leave, because they must. 

And yet, yours still trims truth for myth. Always

reminds you to believe only in the immortal matern.

To stir and stir until the glass frosts in front of you. 

Only then can you understand 

the sacrifice. 


IV.

Muddle the mint, but don’t forget, 

it’s all in the angle of the wrist.

He told you so, in that way men often do. 

It might’ve been a reverie, if ever your narrator had seen 

one. But since you are her and she might very well 

be I, let’s skip to 

the end.


Kayla King is the author of These Are the Women We Write About, a micro-collection of poetry published by The Poetry Annals. Her fiction and poetry has been published by Firewords Magazine, Sobotka Literary Magazine, and Fearsome Critters among others. You can follow Kayla’s writing journey over at her website: kaylakingbooks.com or her twitterings @KaylaMKing.  

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PoetryJeremy Bibaud