Brooke Harries

Whoopee Ti Yi Yo

Mom said I looked like a newscaster
in my second-grade photo. Already

didn’t see me without a role. So I tried
many on. It’s been eleven

summers without her. I’m just listening
to her records, playing each side for scratches.

Too much white blues. One 50s
country record I don’t know

belonged to her. Grief’s ornate offices
are patient. Something in me strives

each day, feet forward, without bickering,
financial mishaps, to live

not wishing
a daughter near.

I find eat shit fuck you inscribed
on a Pink Floyd, place Boz Scaggs

in the maybe pile. Occupy my time,
same small hands, legs,

hours alone cackling at TV.
What if one did better next time

instead of repairing. My mother,
my daughter, my mother,

round and round. I am a record
of her. Could discard most,

never find another side.

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Brooke Harries’ poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, North American Review, Salamander, The Shore, Sixth Finch and elsewhere. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize, the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship and the UC Irvine Graduate Award for Excellence in Poetry. Currently, she teaches at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana.