Rochelle Hurt
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From The Rusted City
The Old Mill
is where the birds live, the smallest sister tells her mother. “I saw them weaving baskets in the eaves.” The quiet mother slides a thread between her lips, sucks a minute, as if on licorice. She’s working on a slipcover. “That’s impossible—” she says, eyes crossed on the thread she now pulls from her mouth, “they’re gone.” The smallest sister shakes her head, a spring-hinged door swinging as the birds flit in and out and in. On the floorboards, a shadow show unfolds while the quiet mother weaves a needle into her hand, and mends. The shrubs peck quietly at the window. Steel mill, still mill, sill mill, the smallest sister thinks. The birds are there, eating the rust from their wings.
The Favorite Father Gets Home from Work
and sets his lunch pail on the table. He shakes himself off like a dog, and the smallest sister watches as clumps of gathered rust fall from his chafed arms and legs. Some scatter across the floor. Some form a pile of platelets at his feet. Some disintegrate immediately, with all of his mistakes.
The Quiet Mother Cups the Favorite Father’s Ear
with her lip. It quivers on her tongue like a lump of pudding, a tapioca earlobe. The smallest sister is behind the wall, watching through a termite hole. She sees their hands and legs tangle into a knot of twine on the bed. When one of the hands reaches up and ties itself to the chain in the ceiling, black spills into the room. The smallest sister gasps and shreds of rust flutter from the peephole into her mouth. They snag their way down, crumpling like foil in her throat.
The Smallest Sister Decides to Make Herself Red
often. She crushes the sun into her collarbone. She strings corroded washers into a necklace. She dresses her lips in the sanguine river water and sucks the stain from pipes behind the aluminum plant, leaving a trail of crust down her throat. Her words emerge already weathered with rust, and she feels herself grow older with each one—older than the oldest sister, older than the quiet mother, older even, she thinks, than the mill the favorite father loves so much. When he touches her, she is as old as the city that folds in like a fist around them.
The Quiet Mother Hides
inside a maze of numbered streets lined with bungalows. Behind the First Street is the Second Street, and inside the Second Street is the Third Street, and at the center of the Third Street lies the Fourth Street—paved in a circle so that the houses there can stare at each other all night and never feel lonely. Each bungalow is made of four tin sheets, two windows, and no door. The sun slinks around the bungalows restlessly—a light that looks from tin sheet to tin sheet, then falls blinking into the street, dizzy as a holiday.
Some evenings, the smallest sister comes to the Fourth Street to sit outside her mother’s new home. Feet tucked beneath her in the road, she watches the quiet mother through the bungalow’s front window. Usually the quiet mother is combing rust from her hair just as the sun slides into the bungalow through the opposite window and sets behind her. Etched by its light, she becomes an antique, oxidized at the knees and elbows, her feet already settling into a fine patina.
All of these poems appear in The Rusted City, a novel in poems from White Pine Press, as well as:
The Old Mill - Versal (2011)
The Favorite Father Gets Home from Work - Cincinnati Review (2012)
The Quiet Mothers Cups - Cincinnati Review (2012)
The Smallest Sister Decides to Make Herself Red - Cincinnati Review (2012)
The Quiet Mother Hides - Cincinnati Review (2012)
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Rochelle Hurt is the author of The Rusted City, a novel in poems published by White Pine Press (2014). Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2013, Crab Orchard Review, Hunger Mountain, Mid-American Review, The Southeast Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.