Looking at the Earth From a Small Galaxy of Meanness

Anya Maria Johnson

COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards – Runner-Up, Poetry

We were playing cards after dinner, my mother and I.

She was laughing, face accordioned in unchecked joy.

I saw my wide nose spread wider, my lips peeled back

over nicotine-shaded teeth, my weak jaw doubled.

I said something like, you are so ugly when you laugh.

I remember the scrape of a chair pushed back, her on the lip

of the bathtub, sobbing with a tenor of grief I did not know.

How could I know? That my mother could be lonely

like a boxcar, a torn wristband, a phone flashlight switched on

by accident, illuminating what collects in the corners of a purse;

how could I know my mother forgot to teach us kindness?

That, years later, I would understand, watching a cricket—

loose in a church basement, antennae blindly searching for grass–

fall from a seat-back into a hymnal, brown as a bruised knee.

Writer’s Notebook

Shortly after moving to New York in 2021, something prompted me to think of “the worst thing I had ever done.” This was it: a moment of casual, reflexive cruelty towards someone I love. The core of that memory is the horror I felt witnessing my mother react––it was perhaps the first time I saw her as a human rather than an archetype or projection. Although my parents certainly taught me the importance of kindness to others, I think it's difficult for parents, especially mothers, to demand kindness for themselves. Empathy and consciousness are learned not only from our primary caregivers, but from our environment and our experience with the world around us. As an early adult, this experience was a pivotal step towards consciousness.

Judge’s Notes

"The speaker in this poem encounters their mother’s internalized loneliness for what seems like the first time. It is reminiscent of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Both speakers learn their parents have an entire emotional world inside themselves, separate and unique from their children. And through the specificity of the images of the bathtub and the church scene, this speaker realizes the need for kindness, even when it isn’t taught. This poem renders, quite poignantly, how we often only understand this need for kindness in hindsight." — William Fargason, 2023 Poetry Judge

"Who among us, as young people, did not glimpse their reflection in an older relative and cringe, revolted by the very fact of aging and how little time’s passing might promise? The speaker of this poem reacts unkindly to this glimpse, an impulse that leaves their mother crying in the bathroom, and the lasting shame and pain of this exchange — those emotions that may teach as often as they blight — are captured here with searing precision." — Emily Pittinos, 2023 Poetry Judge

About the writer