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At My Mother's Dresser

Published onDec 09, 2024
At My Mother's Dresser
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At My Mother’s Dresser

I lift my five-year-old 
body on the chair to watch 
her fingers lift blush powder, 

(burnt rose), to her face. 
The strokes seem counted 
out, maybe twenty brushes 


on each cheekbone. In the mirror 
I mimic her, but she doesn't 
smile, and instead, dabs 


perfume on her wrists and neck, 
combs back her stiff, chestnut 
hair cut short above the ear, 


a bird's nest, a crown, adjusts 
an opalescent button in the silk 
blouse's eye, the stockings 


already torn. Without a word, 
sigh, in haste she chooses 
large, red, faux bijou beads 


to hide the pale olive in her skin. 
I know these things make her 
stand apart from the others, 


PTA mothers, grocery clerks, 
the women in afternoon dramas. 
I will grow to resemble her: our eyebrows 


too dark, two brush strokes of rain 
clouds, our noses edged pyramids, 
always causing a double look, a glance. 


She rubs cream under the eyes' 
half-moons, taupe for the lids. 
To match her nails (another burnt hue


of red) she fumbles for the final touch 
on her mouth. She needs to hurry 
before they arrive: the relatives


who have been missing for years, 
names mentioned, tossed photos 
in a shoebox, phone calls cut short,


people she hated to leave behind
in Syria while she and my father 
made the trek to the States.


I know there is something
even more unique about her 
than the others, because as she swirls


the lipstick toward her mouth, one 
hand smoothes the color on, while 
the other dabs the crying that's


begun. She does this without a change 
of face, she does this as if it's part
of dressing, of carrying on.


Volume 38, no. 1, 2009



Lory Bedikian’s second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her first collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
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