The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem

I Have a Theory about Reflection

Renée Ashley

I cannot put my mother in the freezer and neither can I store her 
in the attic nor in the bank box nor in the canister of sugar In 
fact she is calling me now she is ringing in my kitchen in both 
bedrooms in the upstairs office I am wearing her like a too-big 
coat The coat is made of wire I shoo her away I flap my hands: 
go away go away I am a match and every time we speak--and 
sometimes when we do not--she strikes me Even in the bend of a 
spoon I can see her reaching

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Renée Ashley, author of four books of poetry, a chapbook, and a novel, has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her latest collection of poems, Basic Heart, won the X. J. Kennedy Award. She teaches in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program.