Artist’s Statement
I build walls with ripped up cups paper
bags & postcards add charcoal & rage
ink & regret. I hope for the tiger’s
arrival (or owl or lumbering rhino)
to tremble your gaze quaking
color & disclosure. Such a small room
this white page for blue-black & yellow
in teeth & gowns. I put wings
on the tiger. The angel wants grass
beneath her toes speaks on difficult
issues of ascension. She condescends
to the tiger whose earth-muscle
heats this scene. She is the better
hunter. More bitter. Hungrier.
20 Moor Street, 1934
I share this room with Reny
and Wilfred who go to work
before I get up.
This morning I hear Maman talking
to baby Paul through the floor grate
and Papa not speaking English
before he leaves to cut down trees all day.
I like our house even though
my little sister Jo
died here. I like all my sisters
especially Rita and I like this bedroom
full of curse words
and smoke. When I get home from school
I draw stars on the wall behind the dresser
with the soft pencil
I took from the art supplies Sister Francis
handed out. It’s a sin to steal
but I couldn’t help it.
I hum Maman’s floating song
wishing for deep blue and yellow
as I smudge over
the pink wallpaper roses. I draw Jupiter’s
moons like in the book Sister
showed us.
I give the biggest moon Papa’s eyes
sketch stars thick as his freckles.
When the door slams
and onions sizzle and the first step creaks
the stairs I push the dresser back
my sky almost hidden.
20 Moor Street, 1940
Willy and Ikie and Ray serious and laughing
work in the paper mill.
Right now, they’re making a bench
and shelves for the shed.
Me I’m making a new rocker for Maman.
I love how the pine gives in
to the saw the way the plane lifts
yellow shavings
how the wood turns smooth as silk
when I sand and oil it.
We speak two tongues my brothers
and me. Spring-summer-fall
we plant and build with our Papa
still strong at fifty
who works the night shift and grows
heritage roses.
He sings while he weeds. Our hammers echo
down the tight-built street.
Fences tilt toward the river like thirsty horses
and houses lean
toward one another shrugging as if to say
it’s pretty good here. It’s okay.
23 Campbell Street
Asphalt siding and backyard garden
across-the-street Maytag-in-the-yard and down-the-hill
railroad tracks milkweed
and marshmallow
fluff one uncle in the-house-behind another one
up-the-hill half-finished cigarettes
French swear words
and JMJ for JesusMaryJoseph
in cursive at the top of each school notebook page
Little Women and Gulliver The Hardy Boys
The Green Fairy Book and
why don’t you go out and play?
I want so much from the past and isn’t a house a harbinger
of future endings like a child’s
drawing with a lopsided porch
shutters and smoke
curling from the chimney? This is where I live
I tell my teacher or I tell myself
in past tense as I write
another poem titled “from”
or “home” this house a grayscale memory
like a church like the ring
my mother gave me
like a doll’s house
in which I make the tiny plastic mother and father
look at one another make them see
their kids as something
other than
little blue boy and little pink girls in their upstairs
rooms open to the backyard
with always the chance
of falling.
My parents sing in their separate rooms
my mother’s sadness an heirloom
on the sideboard my father’s
yearning a garden
hoe. I renovate the toolshed paint the kitchen
tangerine add a library full
of questions and soft chairs
for the uncles.
[application]
transport
Everywhere fill-in-the-blank
petitions full of expected data-
bank designations both words
& numbers—d.o.b. height
gender citizenship—all of it
folded to fit into little boxes for
job apartment loan visa
only the smallest spaces [as
usual] not quite enough for
your favorite color your
grandmother’s raspberries or
where your mother kept her
cigarettes. No confessional nor
the clouds you especially loved
when you were nine. All data
flash-fed into squares even
your face bright little blur
almost unrecognizable closes
& opens new countries as you
fold into your seat on the train
cross borders stamped
admitted & welcomed at last
into a final box even this one a
bad fit mahogany or cedar
some elemental wood with
satin & polished brass sliding
into earth.
Jeri Theriault has received 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, the 2022 NORward Prize, and a 2019 Maine Literary Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, Plume, and many other journals. Jeri’s poetry collections include Radost, my red and In the Museum of Surrender. In 2021, she edited WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. She lives in South Portland, Maine.https://www.jeritheriault.com/