curfew missed and the motherglare

Ali Beheler

It was my mother who came from nothing, not me
on the straw mattress learning how to sleep
with one eye open on the doorframe no door

brother three walls away in wildness never reined
enough, never enough fenced in. Trained eye
on me when, I later learned, the same age, same

proximity of boy skin, boy thigh, boy hand
on my calf I led into his lap like running
down the chute straight for the stillness of stun. Only

I, ungratefully then, now with grief for her, take 
what the door she gave me let me nightly learn: how 
to bear my own sprouting through the dirt in dark, urges

rooted, wrapped so tight in ownskin long enough
to burst, glinting gold that every part of oneday him
would gleam unto my eye, seem to sing come

here, and here, and here into the waiting green 
every door willed open, lock so gladly sprung
toward my freedom swallowing the keys with gusto 

and wantingmore she saved me for my yesthroat 
lowing and open to receive gratefully mouth on him salt-
licked, squealing glee through every bright inch, him, the field.

Ali Beheler’s recent work appears in The Shore, SRPR, Rogue Agent, Harpur Palate, Tupelo Quarterly, ballast journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Willows Wept, and elsewhere. Winner of the SRPR Editor’s Prize (2024) and the Milton J. Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry (2025), she has received residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She teaches at Hastings College in Hastings, NE, where she lives with sweet Emmylou. Find her at www.alibeheler.com.