Ellen June Wright

Bio: Ellen June Wright is a poet based in Hackensack, New Jersey. She was born in England of West Indian parents and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attended school in NJ and taught high-school language arts for three decades. She has worked as a consulting teacher on the guides for three PBS poetry series called Poetry Haven, Fooling with Words and the Language of Life. Her poetry has most recently been published in River Mouth Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, New York Quarterly, The Elevation Review, The Caribbean Writer and, is forthcoming in, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week and was featured in the article, Exceptional Prose Poetry From Around the Web: June 2021. She was a finalist in the Gulf Stream 2020 summer poetry contest and is a founding member of Poets of Color virtual poetry workshop in New Jersey. She studies writing at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Ellen can be found on Twitter@EllenJuneWrites.

The Needle

Before she had her cataracts removed mother’s brown eyes were almost blue covered with a thin veil of gray. It was getting harder and harder for her to see even with her glasses on. I always had to thread her needles.
Now, I wish I had been sweeter, more understanding of what it means to age, how slowly you lose one strength and then another, how your body abandons you before you're done with it, how it angers and frustrates to not be in control of the thing that makes you you.
Mother tells me that she will not be here this fall. The cargo ship can sail to the islandwithout a barrel from me to her.

Home

where they still call you by your childhood name the one you couldn’t wait to shed like old skin,
to catch and watch go up in flames like kindling among fire wood
and no one calls you by that name anymore except when you go home because
they refuse to see you've left her behind. She was such a brief part of your life.
Frail like early grass, you murdered her and buried her in a ditch
along the side of the road some time ago hoping no one would ever find her body.

On the Raising of Children

Some parents raise children the way they slice a fresh-baked loaf, serrated knife in hand,
plunging in sawing back and forth, grinding the bread between their teeth until nothing’s left.
Some devour children the way the cyclops grabbed up each intruding sailor
and ate him or the way Scylla darted her long necks from her cavernous lair
and consumed Odysseus's men until each of her six throats gorged on flesh.
Parenting can be butchery and blood, body parts left strewn about the house
casualties of our belief anyone can parent if he or she loves enough. There’s no curriculum,
no required course of study, no university to train us to do the most important thing we’ll ever do.
It's everyone for themselves; learn on the job, make your mistakes. Masticate.
Chew your children slowly or swallow them whole. Hope for wisdom. Hope love sutures wounds.

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