This summer’s images are all about endings
by Edith-Nicole Cameron
The stubborn last sip of coffee muddying my mug’s bottom. The tips of my youngest’s salt-crusted curls twirling to the floor as my scissors snip. The perfect final page of Pillars of the Earth, whose blood-soaked betrayals tucked me into bed all June. Dusk, an exercise in black-out poetry. Metaphors, everywhere, and the literal too: two friends divorcing on their twentieth anniversary and my eldest’s adulthood clouding the horizon. Dad’s swollen ankles and slowed cadence hinting at the unthinkable. USAID defunded. Public education under siege. Democracy’s castration and terminal diagnoses too close to home. I’m a mother and so I think about death a lot. Since that first thin pink line marked the beginning – the inaugural begetting – before bleeding dry just days later, fading into a spectral memory mattering only to me, it seemed – life and death have been but a breath apart. That’s both metaphor and literal, and it’s why mothers hate to exhale. Because you can’t take a moment for granted. Because everyone dies, and in the meantime everything ends. This summer’s images are an assault on the senses and my relationship with each is loaded. The harvest’s worth of forgotten pin cherries painting the sidewalk a sticky rotten blue. The sour film fuzzing my mouth once the ice cream’s sweetness dissolves. The ribbon of smoke making my eyes water after the birthday candles are extinguished. The echo of my footfalls in the family room when the party moves on.
Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) reads, writes, and mothers in Minneapolis. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction appear in various journals, including Literary Mama and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and on her Substack: Writing it Out. Find her online at https://edithnicolewrites.com/.