Christopher Ankney

The Derivation of Mother Is Dam

On our firstborn’s first birthday my thumb shadow-swiped
the screen—Mom—the conditioning of child. 

What do you want? Unspoken wound like an open-faced sandwich.
I don’t understand either of us.

                                                            You planted dynamite
in our blood, set your children upon each other
like bombers.

                        Everyone is living a crusade, only some
are blessed to keep their hands
soft, their cuticles
                                cleansed.

*

So like our dogs, we can be, eyes unable to color
the aftermath into anything but loyalty—a dumbness
rewarded.

Better than a goldfish, I guess, that glass bowl
of innocence, where staying afloat

            requires dancing with two left fins and a fond memory
of the slightly warped
                        wooden plank, the nail-head’s lip puckering
the repeat apology. 

We both hold on to the start of a decade, the last time
you held his face, or mine.

*

You strut into the tent like a three-ringed conductor
and ask permission to see

my children. Your face a time machine. Your voice a steady rainfall.

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Christopher Ankney's Hearsay won the 2014 Jean Feldman Prize at WWPH and was finalist for the 2015 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been featured in Boston Review (online), Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, Pleiades and dozens of other fine journals over the years. In Fall 2026, he will be the Dr. Maureen Murphy Distinguished Professorship for Equity in Education at College of Southern Maryland, where he is a tenured professor of English. His author website is www.christopherankney.com.