Assistant Editor Maggie Su: How can language be used to express the limits of language? In Laura Grothaus’s “Also Milk,” Luca reveals to the speaker that her mother’s losing language. “She calls everything milk. / Ketchup is milk. Water is milk.” Like the cages of the monkeys in her opening line, the speaker comes up against the inflexible boundaries of empathy. The ending lines are an invocation to the power of the attempt, language’s false equivalencies which Grothaus writes are “kinds of giving enough in the doing.”
To hear Laura read her poem, click below:
Also Milk
We were watching monkeys wring the wrists
of each branch, spring babies
losing their hands in their mothers’ fur, then
letting go, when Luca said, My momma’s letting go
of language. She calls everything milk.
Ketchup is milk. Water is milk. Luca
was still Luca, but also milk. And I tried
to feel some of this for Luca, as if that
would make Luca feel less. The monkeys’ cages
widened an ache in us. The quiet after
one golden howler peeled a cry. Why
were we here? Both of us at odds with corrals
and coops. I spun out the iterations of grief,
kinds of giving enough in the doing.
Here is the tonic of crows and the thicket
in your mind yielding to touch, here is the hand.
Laura Grothaus is a Baltimore-based poet and visual artist. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and garnered awards internationally, from Poetry in Pubs in Bath, England, to the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition in Cary, North Carolina. Galleries in New York and San Diego have shown her drawings. You can visit her online at www.lauragrothaus.com.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
