CAOLAN MADDEN

From Last Baby: Daughter of Cups

for Becca Klaver

“The Daughter enjoys a bath in the waterfall while a turtle holds her cup … She feels the innocent joy in her sexuality as well as the ecstatic pleasure of being in nature’s beauty. She is radiating joy to others.”

- Motherpeace Tarot 

I hated the essay about sobriety as a feminist act
I was like fuck you Molly Hatchets, I’m doing great
and I was. I’m not a fucking wine mom I’m a party
mom and I am having a great fucking time

fuck yeah babies in the beer garden
fuck yeah champagne on the Eurostar

My mom doing the chug-chug motion behind my back at the wedding reception
after I almost puked into the microphone in church
but fuck you I sounded like a fucking angel
even if the night before the room was spinning and I said
fixing my eyes on the star-pattern the lamp made on the ceiling
my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure
and Digby was wrong and please God forgive my husband for being an atheist
fuck you it only happened because they served a whole dead pig
at the rehearsal dinner & all I could eat was one margarita
after another

I hated the essay about how alcohol is a carcinogen
& the smug author saying I’ve never been overweight
sometimes shit just happens to you, lady
sometimes shit just happens to virtuous thin people
and the most virtuous atheists whose hearts are so pure
everybody asking me how Paul got cancer at 37
must be all the pollution in NYC
I wondered myself, I started laying blame:
who let you get all those sunburns at camp
the nonstick coating all scraped off the 30-year-old cookware

They were appalled by the bottle of wine I brought over
but then seven years later they drank one glass a night
who wants to live forever

I hated the essay about how alcohol is a carcinogen
I hated I did everything right when wrong =
family history, obesity,
not nursing, waiting to have children
I hated the essay but I can feel it in my cells
those nights and years,
soaking in it. That innocent joy,
a girlhood deliciously pickled
synthetic estrogen & mid-priced gin

I hated, too, the Catholic bros in workshop
and their rants against the Pill & dispassionate
visions of fucking, like get over it, you fake vitalists
I’m doing great. And I was
trading one pleasure for another, maybe
as I’d been trained to do

until beer-gardened & babied I suddenly
had it all, by which I mean
a beer and a body, deep in my cups
and facing the heavens, hey Jupiter,
you trickster, that equipoise, that trick, that burst
of pleasure you find floating in one cup
almost not knowing that there, in the other
on the balance, is death

MY DAD CAN NOW READ MY POEMS ON THE INTERNET

My dad can now read my poems on the internet

Well, fine. What was I protecting him from
anyway. What is there left

That time I said Dad. What have you ever done
for me

The time I wouldn’t let him stay at our apartment
The time I wouldn’t let him stay at our rental cottage
The time I wouldn’t drive him to the liquor store
The time I had to pick him up from the afterparty

The poem I sent him about how he taught me about spring
He read it on the radio

All my aunts writing out their poems longhand
& mailing the xeroxes to everyone in the family
All those calligraphic serifs just baldly stating the facts
like he cried out for his sons & like three stanzas
each one with a different relative’s last words

like here you go, get it out there
get it out of this heart
& into this machine & this envelope
& these nieces & nephews

Oh dad whatever you’re nobody’s black shoe

That time I couldn’t sleep for a year because I thought there was a murderer
on the stairs
in the washing machine
under the bed

That time I was reverse-haunted

Oh dad whatever but I thought nobody was taking care of us
Oh dad whatever but nobody was, though

That time I was like, oh but he needs his lupines

That time I was like, oh but he needs his high-school girlfriend

That time I was like, oh but this is killing him

That time I heard about the lake of blood

That time he called me right before the hurricane
and I didn’t hear from him for two months
and my grandma had to say are you sitting down 

Oh dad you don’t have access to a Xerox machine
but you make woodcuts
and now your high-school girlfriend has an office job

That time we were sitting in the botanical garden eating apples and cheese and my baby was lying on her little square blanket in the grass and my dad started telling me about it, for the first time. Never having written out a poem, or mailed it. That time he said he had a mattress down in the basement that time he said it was my job to talk to him while he sobered up that time he said but I had a date with two girls that time he said if I hadn’t gone out with those two girls that time he said if I hadn’t made that dollhouse furniture for my sisters that time he said the knife wouldn’t have been up there 

That time he carried it with him all his life

Dear Grandma and Barbara and Kitty and Mary Alaina and Ann, this is my Madden woman poem.
Thank you for bequeathing me this form.
Thank you for sending it away to me in its envelopes

Dear Dad, thank you for carrying it inside you and away from me,
sending lupines instead, tree ladies, single earrings, shells,
Polaroids, feathers. You did that for me

until I grew up pretty safe, and pretty whole
and I’m here now on the internet
and here we both are, I guess, and we’ll see, now,
how safe it is

Caolan Madden’s poems and essays can be found in various journals and anthologies, including the forthcoming Electric Gurlesque, We Are the Baby-Sitters Club, and Midwinter Day: A Constellation. She is the author of the poetry chapbook VAST NECROHOL (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018). She lives in the collapsed space-time of pandemic parenthood and the Internet, where she teaches both college students and second graders.