Poetry / Brooke Harries 

:: Corolla ::

	
You will have everything you wanted
when you no longer need it. You will
own a car and have hours to drive,
but will no longer be a smoker. 
That turn to the highway that made 
no sense will separate from another 
dead end and you will hold each 
like a sprig of garnish. You will drive 
to Maine alone, eat a lobster, 
and the warmth of melted butter will 
remind you of popcorn, then of teeth, 
then losing the first few, and your mother, 
the Tooth Fairy, unfailing in that one role. 
You realize you forgave her before too late.
Your heart hurts for the day you cleaned
her apartment as the September sun set, 
one sibling shut in a home, another 
wandering off. How you drove back 
to the city in your friend’s Corolla. 
You are no longer friends with her. 
Your needing wasn’t mutual. Sometimes 
you heard her tell her other friend I love
you on the phone and wondered
who said it first. You miss her and 
you miss your mother and your sisters
and you are in Maine with a book 
on a dining table. You will want to 
hurl yourself onto the hotel bed and call 
someone out of the blue, but you turn 
on the TV and watch Forensic Files 
without sound. The jumping wavy lines 
of its title flare yellow and red across 
the screen and you elect to search 
for some ice. You slip your key 
into your hand and enter the hall 
with the plastic bucket. You find 
that nothing, not the click of a door 
opening nearby, elevator, fire escape, 
janitorial closet, escapes your clattering 
loneliness. You eye the paisley floor 
like peacocks in traffic staring at you 
through their desperate show.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Corol­la” is from a col­lec­tion of poems that explores the nuances of grow­ing up with a men­tal­ly ill moth­er through the lens­es of gen­der, eco­nom­ic strug­gle, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and the con­flu­ence of the nat­ur­al and mod­ern in my cur­rent home in the Deep South. Back­ground­ing domes­tic imagery and daili­ness, the poems med­i­tate on thwart­ed inti­ma­cy in var­i­ous rela­tion­ships. As my speaker’s voice moves between a humor­ous and plain­tive tone, the poems make music out of painful rec­ol­lec­tion. Music and song lyrics also appear as sub­jects, sig­nal­ing ties to mem­o­ries that are inescapable. Food appears in the poems too, link­ing my speaker’s past and present. My aim in writ­ing these poems was to be com­pan­ion­able to read­ers, to hon­est­ly exam­ine child­hood mem­o­ries, and to account for why cer­tain moments cor­re­late with the past so strong­ly. Although my moth­er has passed away, I have not writ­ten con­ven­tion­al ele­gies for her; rather, I have been com­pelled to write poems that inves­ti­gate mun­dan­i­ties that she would have noticed, often cen­ter­ing scenes on the lone­ly moment an old wound is remem­bered. Work­ing against reifi­ca­tion and over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of com­plex char­ac­ters, I hope to bring more ques­tions to con­ver­sa­tions about gen­der and men­tal illness.

Brooke Har­ries’ work has appeared in Den­ver Quar­ter­ly, Lau­rel Review, North Amer­i­can Review, Puer­to del Sol, Sala­man­der, Sixth Finch, and else­where. She was award­ed the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Harold Tay­lor Prize, the Dorothy and Don­ald Strauss Endowed Dis­ser­ta­tion & The­sis Fel­low­ship, the UC Irvine Grad­u­ate Award for Excel­lence in Poet­ry, and the Joan John­son Award for Poet­ry. She has an MFA from UC Irvine and is cur­rent­ly pur­su­ing a PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Mississippi.