Good Mother Manifesto

Good mothers wear tobacco pouches
filled with lost teeth, divide
their bodies into muffin tins, serve

themselves for breakfast. Good
mothers even out wobbly table legs
with their dream journals and pinky skin.

They make afternoon tea
with the children’s bathwater. Good mothers say
out loud, This is delicious. Good mothers stuff
magpie feathers in their ears, stuff magpie feathers
in their children’s ears. Good mothers build cages

out of antelope ribs. Good mothers live
in these cages. Good mothers know birds

have something to say about weight
loss. Good mothers go to bed
starving. Good mothers know they are free

to walk on lake bottoms and not
drown, free to make a meal of paint chips,
free to pull their hangnails off
up to the elbow. Good mothers give away everything

except lightning: cracking above
their clouds, cracking in their valleys,
sometimes ripping up the land, other times
leaving no trace at all.

Author of the article

Stacy Boe Miller is a prose writer and a poet. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Sun, Copper Nickel, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, Terrain.org where she recently won the Editor’s Prize in Poetry, and other journals. Her poetry manuscript was a finalist for the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry with Lynx House Press, The Wheeler Prize with The Journal, and the St. Lawrence Poetry Prize with Black Lawrence Press. She is the current Poet Laureate of Moscow, Idaho. More of her work can be found at stacyboemiller.com.