By Maggie Wolff
Alternate Universes: My Grandmother’s Suicide Never Happened
The world shapes itself a ball
with millions of smaller globes as internal structure
and stuffing. Our globe floats, bounces
gently against other spheres,
just another fish in a full tank. Our family never feels the sudden impact
of thermocline splash
as deep ocean scorched from wet to earthy, metallic core—the bullet
my grandmother hurled, her quiet asteroid to end a planet.
My mother told my grandmother the first time love
blackened her eye. She left our father,
and we moved to Chicago to live
with my not-gone-too-soon grandmother.
My grandmother died, not alone in a bathtub,
but years later, surrounded
by daughter and granddaughters in the quiet of a hospital,
last rites from her priest replacing strike of bullet
with a whisper of prayer.
In this universe, I know
my mother tried, loved
her daughters enough to keep them intact—our family fault lines
vibrate but refuse to open-earth-break.
There are no blocked number phone calls,
ice-sheet loneliness, my hand on trigger or blade.
The memory of my grandmother and mother
soft-lights the cracks in our globe—a history rewritten.
Alternate Universes: Mothers Don’t Detox, Daughters Don’t Rehab
In another universe, my mother never taught me
how women could alcohol-ache
their way through a life. I didn’t know
DTs could rattle-shake-strip my mother,
tension twist her back to a girl
like a soaked towel wrung of its wet,
as she called out for her dead mother, the withdrawals
leaving her open bodied afraid and hallucinating
that blue men were fingerclawing through the walls.
My mother never had to be hospitalized for her drinking,
never gave birth drunk enough
to almost kill her baby.
She didn’t detox with other backbroken women,
other mothers weighed down with nothing
left to give the crying, wantful jaws
gnawing on the meat-bare bones of her meager offering.
In another universe, my mother never taught me
how a daughter inherits the same rust-throated thirst,
a ripped sideways hunger. I never jumped-fell into the bottle
like a second home reminder of the first—just as dark
but twice as cold. You knew better,
you always knew better, my family history choir sang
its refrain in every slosh, sip, and swallow.
I knew to listen before it faded away—
voices growing louder, a cathedral song of warning,
blood-hungry knives hidden in the echo of each note.
Alternate Universes: A Spinal Tap Wouldn’t Remind Me of My Mother
In another universe, a spinal tap wouldn’t tap
into a subterranean mother-cry, a language tongue-forgotten.
There would be no underground shame swell
rushing through the doors of my daylight speak. That word
would just be a word. It wouldn’t remind memory
that I had a mother. It wouldn’t take years
to forgive the mouth for what it had said
on a freezing-bright examination table,
curled like a fetus, a needle in the spine.
Unnamed Primal Emotional
Response: a buried human
impulse to respond to sudden
pain, trauma, or fear by
regressing to a childlike state
wherein a person calls out for
their mother. The words “mom,”
“mommy,” and “mama” are the
most common last words of
humans moments before death.
The needle would miss nerve, metal tip on human hot wire,
an internal hiss of heat and electricity, so much worse than a sharp stab
slowly spreading—this fire births at its peak, instantly screams
body wide, and the mind retreats to survive.
Bone-bright light wouldn’t flood the nerve highway
from spine to brain to lip slip-out, a word—
unrecognized as it erupts through me—mommy.
Delirium Tremens (also
called the DTs): a psychotic
condition seen in chronic
alcoholics caused by alcohol
withdrawal and leading to
tremors, hallucinations, and a
confused sense of reality.
Most alcoholics won’t experience DTs when detoxing.
It’s a hell realm reserved for drunks
with a long history of heavy thirst. My mother
spent detox demon-held and bed-strapped
as the room closed in, blue fingers spider-leg crawling,
pushing through plaster—
the men always coming for her. Her mother
died years before, and still, she called out—mommy.
Leaking cerebrospinal fluid
(CSF): a lumbar puncture
complication caused by
puncturing the dura mater
(protective membrane of the
spine) where the CSF leaks
into the body instead of
providing the fluid to the
brain. It results in a searing
headache and pressure when
a person is upright.
There would be no complications:
my head wouldn’t become a pressure chamber. Green light
building and blocking my vision wouldn’t force me flat in submission.
The doctor would never say blood patch.
My blood—arm-sourced and relocated to lumbar puncture
site to form a clot—would patch the spinal leak.
I don’t want to ask the doctor, what if
you inject my mother’s blood? Would it cure
other injuries? If you inject my blood into my mother,
will it heal her mother-wound?