Claire McQuerry

Matriarchs of the Rust Belt

His grandmother, before she wed, worked for Scranton Lace,
skimming white threads from the sheets of lace
that flew through the machines. I don’t like to touch

the memories, but sometimes they touch me, like steel
rollers that zing with furious heat. His mother said
I was dead to her near the end, when I took that job 

out-of-state. No one loves me like she does, he said.
She wanted her relations close, within the invisible
fence of her influence. Sometimes I had to run,

to beat my erratic pulse. You’re already too thin,
he’d say as I laced my shoes, Soon I won’t be
attracted to you. I’d run past the sealed mine shaft 

in Nay Aug Park, the bandstand ringed in caution tape,
the hospital’s ambulance bay. I’d run at the lake
where his mother and aunt said not to go alone. Stay home, 

they’d say. It’s safest home. At first, I’d only cry in the car,
alone, on my drive to work as I imagined growing old
in that place. The distant knuckles of the Poconos 

vanished the highway in their green folds and something
twinged where my thoughts wouldn’t reach. Before it went
in the oven, his mother would stitch the porchetta closed 

with a needle and thread, her mother’s recipe. When I gave
his aunt the spare key, I forgot my own, locked in the house
in my rush to prove he had it all wrong, our doors were 

always open to the women who’d raised him. His rage
at my mistake could have lifted the roof from the car.
Those years degrade, a whole abandoned factory of them, 

rain falling through the unglassed skylights onto the looms.
Many the hours I’d sit at his mother’s kitchen table,
its flowered oilcloth littered with bills, and listen 

to her gripes and gossip while no breeze blew through
the storm door’s screen or stirred the curtains with their hems
of lace. It took a long time for me to make an exit from that place.

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Claire McQuerry's poems have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, RHINO, Memorious, The Sun Magazine, The Southern Poetry Review and other journals. She is the author of Lacemakers (Southern Illinois University Press) and Through Glass Rooms (forthcoming from Parlor Press) and the co-translator, with Celine Bourhis, of Virginie Lalucq's Cutting the Stems (Saturnalia Books). She is an Associate Professor at Bradley University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.