Speaking to My Mother at Twenty

I know you are nervous because you have been dreaming—
visions of the buck your lover shot and hung, of your father
burning the baby blue dresser the day you left home.
You follow the smoke west, but by the time you arrive,
ghosts live in every house. The dead play loud music
and you cannot sleep, so you find a lover who dreams.
Your new friends want happiness. They sleep three to a bed.
They want to dance. It is 1999 and the world promises
to end very soon. A woman stops you in the street and says
all the unborn babies spoke to her. They said do not be afraid.
Four thousand miles east, the dresser keeps burning.
You swim in the creek and think blue blue blue.
You stumble out the door, hand on your beating heart.
Know that when you tell your lover I am coming, he kneels.
He says do not be afraid. He says baby, let’s go west.

Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:
For me, poetry is a way to transmute consciousness across time and space, to be possessed by circumstances typically not our own. This piece is for my mother in her younger years; I imagine that it will somehow reach her, traveling via language from now to then.

Maia Decker is a writer and teacher from Montana. She graduated in 2024 from Yale University with her BA in English and concentration in Fiction. She is interested in material histories of the West, dreams, and writing as a way to make sense of our obligations to others, dead and alive.