In this first episode in a new podcast series, Shara Lessley discusses her poem 'The Clinic Bomber’s Mother'.
The poem comes from Shara’s new book, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
In this discussion, Shara first reads her poem and then talks about a number of issues related to it and the book as a whole, such as motherhood, perceptions of the Middle East by Americans and violence in the Middle East and in America, especially domestic terrorism.
Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (with Bruce Snider), she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was recently awarded Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford. Find out more about Shara’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.
The Clinic Bomber’s Mother
The trick, she guesses, is: be seen. Offer
coffee to police, walk among the living
without thinking of the dead. Never
apologize for being his mother. Keep
his photos on the mantel, his boyhood
room the same. Bring daisies to his plot,
ignore the other graves. Who really knows
who knows. She donates blood, is comforted
that strangers wear his clothes, irons
linens for St. Paul’s, whose confessionals
have never felt so cramped. Bless me, Father,
she admits, the bathroom hook still holds
his robe. There’s little time to think or rest.
More and more, the wafer tastes like flesh.
by Shara Lessley