Beautiful from a Distance
.
My first bra was small and red.
My sister tucked it into her pants at Kmart.
It had no hooks but slipped over my head
in a trapeze act of slender straps,
its sole purpose to give boys something to snap.
Our mother never knew. We had fallen that far
from the gray brassieres coiled in her drawer
like tarps riddled with grommets and struts,
each one solid as the underneath
of a suspension bridge.
I’m afraid of bridges, don’t trust rivets
to hold everything up, the way kissing
my mother goodnight couldn’t make me love her
as much as I wanted to. She was beautiful
in photos and from a distance,
architecture of motherhood.
Even without mastering mathematics,
I recognized the force
that holds weight in the air.
.
Melody Wilson’s work appears in One, B O D Y, Emerson Review, Rust and Moth, and other publications. Her first collection received the Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Review. A graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program. Find more at melodywilson.com
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