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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