It is a garden, once my mother’s,
and now one of my own,
where I go, when I need a place to go.
Dresses #1 and #2 belonged to my mother.
Forty years after she died
I returned to the house
where I grew up,
and brought these dresses with me.
My mother is wearing dress #1,
the blue psychedelic dress,
I am standing next to her,
and my abuser, my sister,
stands where the negative
has been exposed to light.
I stood in the garden where Mom stood,
trying to fit into dress #1.
From my diary, December 24, 1976, age 14:
I’m not protected from my sister.
I don’t have a right state of mind.
I don’t know what to do, or how to act.
From my diary, April 16, 1984, age 21:
My mother is dead four months now,
and the house I once called home
must be emptied and sold.
I can't return to that brown-shingled womb
to pull the weeds from the garden.
Forty years later
I can still smell the honeysuckle
mixed with hatred.
My sister prevented me from breathing
by sitting on my chest
She laughed
as I suffocated.
Dress #2
The psychedelic orange dress.
Mother holds our family dog,
then just a puppy.
Fifteen years later they both died only days apart.
Two dresses,
angels; joy and pain,
exist as polarities.
Mother in dress #2, the orange dress,
at my sixth birthday party,
August 4, 1968.
Dress #3
I cherished my first party dress.
It hung in my closet long after I outgrew it.
A reminder that there is joy as well as pain.
Half a century later I still need this party dress.
From my diary, February 27, 1983
My grandmother is losing touch with reality.
Mother worries because she forgets to turn off the stove.
Mother worries because she faints in the Brooklyn heat.
Mother worries because she forgets her daughters face.
I’m worried, as I bow my branches and bear my fruit,
for I am the seed and they are my roots.
Dress # 4
I look just like my great grandmother,
Yetta Wasserman.
She wore floor length black muslin dresses, even in the summer, spoke only Yiddish,
and cooked chicken soup every day of her life.
She came to America because the Cossacks ravaged, looted, raped, and killed;
causing generational trauma which has been passed along our maternal line as we
draw the skirts of our dresses across the centuries.
Pain and joy,
unchanged as the basement
four decades later.
Yetta left the old world to survive.
The tomato is the new world,
and potential for better days to come.