Dethroned & December, 1995
Dethroned
1. I was buoyant— someone spelled JOY on my face when yesterday my son and I pranced about our front yard singing Day O coming I want to go home. Later we drove to the beach to celebrate his former recovery house friends’ sobriety dates. There he surprised me by taking a one-day chip. Me: not asking for explanations, mouth gently closed. You see I’m over the throwing myself on the floor of his rehab all those years ago, a mother dethroned, begging to let me die, if he would not choose to live. 2. The night after the meeting, I dream the boys are piecing together their lives stanza by stanza. Elijah still alive. Not rail thin, not devoured by meth, the streets have not vaulted him to prison and out again, then finally gone. I can’t stop thinking about how the ones who made it once zombie-walked their nights, in fragments but still like the earthworms my son ripped apart and regenerated. Angry fathers, harsh words and overdoses in the muck of cruel teenage years, as lost as the afikomen that one Passover. But now, they make new patterns, grow new limbs, light up like extravagant wildflowers after ceaseless Southern California rains. Word by word, they rewrite their lives. 3. Today, they are floating, no longer shredded to pieces by the sharp red coral, or gasping for air as they flail about. Unsteady but upright, for a moment surfing, high above the waves. Look, I say: there you are, look, they tell me, here you are. holding the shore.
December, 1995
At first we all just took that December to be the month before everything would change. Of all the mad scientist cures for miscarriage, prednisone led to gestational diabetes which led to food deprivation. Finally pregnant, yet on a diet after planning to eat whatever I wanted when I had a real being inside, at last. I held this sparkly feeling that never left no matter the taste of grey toast or dirt, the strange bright red blood at 13 weeks. This time, the baby stayed. The alchemist grew with me. Each day I was a better person: I have to believe this even if some of that goodness may have died with sleep deprivation or later, drug-filled teen years. That December, I decided to measure the post-delivery weeks in pies: one pecan pie a week to make up for all the food I couldn’t eat while pregnant. I cheated once, by mistake, on borscht— who knew beets had so much sugar. That December, we sat around, too sated with sapphires and fire heating us with joy that this bubala had outlasted the fate of so many other lost babies. Nesting, finishing touches on the nursery. Tradeswomen made me a toolkit-patterned quilt. I’d taught them best I could how to be the ones who build the houses, fix the electricity and dive into sewers. To finally make enough to support their tired families. When I hear “Piel Canela,” I think of learning my son, dancing in sling in that two-pie week after birth. I wish I could hold that December when everything seemed possible— ascension, overcoming the slaughterhouse of trying and losing. When I was a treasure chest waiting to be opened waiting to birth the newest generation. A steroid roly-poly. And at nine months, zaftig with readiness to know, to see him land.
header image / blue chair, photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash
About the Author
Carla Rachel Sameth was the 2022-2024 Co-Poet Laureate for Altadena, CA and a 2023 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her books include the memoir, One Day on the Gold Line, the chapbook, What Is Left, and her full-length poetry collection, Secondary Inspections. Carla’s writing on blended/unblended, queer, multiracial and single parent families appears in a variety of publications and has been selected three times as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. a Pasadena Rose Poet, a West Hollywood Pride Poet, and a former PEN Teaching Artist, Carla teaches creative writing to students of all ages, incarcerated youth and other diverse communities.
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