This poem was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #102: Memory Recipes.
I am about mid-way through reading Fourteen: Growing Up Alone in a Crowd by Stephen Zanichkowksy. In this book, Zanichkowksy tells his childhood story — being the eighth child in a family of fourteen, born to a hot-tempered father and an overwhelmed mother who were both physically abusive to their children. In this dark and disturbing memoir, he tells how such an upbringing affected him, leaving him living inside his head, with difficulty connecting to other human beings and a longing for a sense of a separate self away from the crowd.
In one section, he talks about the mass-produced school lunches in his house:
“I remember days I went to school without my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because the image of the mass production of those sandwiches hurt me…Perhaps the sameness of our sandwiches was a reminder that, to outsiders, we kids were all the same, interchangeable.”
The images of sandwiches haunted me and brought to the surface of an old childhood memory. So while this poem is very tenuously linked to the prompt, I’d like to share it anyway. It is lengthy, but worth the read. I hope you walk away from it with something.
-Nicole
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I. Milwaukee, 1979
One night, when I was three, I had a dream. Dolls,
multiplied on a bus. Little goddesses, pink and fresh,
curled nylon hair tumbling down in clusters of
crazy gold waterfalls. All of them, copied from my own, until a
soulless crowd of perfect duplicates sat on the laps of
every girl under the age of five riding this cross town bus. Before this
disturbed act of multiplication, I had been sitting next to my mother,
cradled by a hard-shell bus seat – 1970 remanufactured into indigo plastic
and faded by travel, routine, and transition,
worn buttocks, worn back, worn souls. I had been holding
my doll, the only one of its kind, a smiling warm plastic girl with
blue eyes that blinked and
a red velvet dress trimmed with lace – snowflakes re-written
in soft white thread. The bus,
traveling from stop to stop:
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