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Great Things from the Department of Transportation
My mother desires to track my location on her phone.
My mother announces that she’s “latex intolerant.”
My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.
My mother to the server at a terrible restaurant: I don’t want a box—I want a flamethrower.
One’s mother might be the most famous person one knows.
My mother says, There is no Denny’s, only Zuul.
My mother on penises and traffic cones: On occasion they’re both orange, aren’t they?
The young lungs of my mother fill with fine particulate matter on the streets of Clairton, PA.
My mother on the X-rated hypnotist: He was only concerned with having the hypnotized persons act sexually stupid.
One night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert, my mother ceases to feel apart from the world.
My mother pays my sister and me $40 each to not have birthday parties.
My mother’s soulmate is not my father but her dog, Six.
The only thing I don’t like about John Wick is that he never washes his hair.
My mother’s father, a bipolar beer distributor, laughs at least once that I know of because it echoes through me for 40 years.
On the whole my mother likes Miranda July’s novel, The First Bad Man, but could have done without the sex parts.
I listen to my mother tell my child a story as if I were my own daughter.
My mother tells me there were some skanks on America’s Next Top Model.
My mother asks, Didn’t someone famous say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”
My mother prays for her children every night.
My mother prays for children every night.
I bet you never thought you’d marry, have a baby, and get divorced before you’re 40, she tells me.
My mother expects great things from the Department of Transportation.
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Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, curator, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She’s the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I’m Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You’re On My Period (Counterpath), and others. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, jubilat, Chicago Review, Entropy, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Librarian. [“Great Things from the Department of Transportation” first appeared in the American Poetry Review.] _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
René Magritte. The Double Secret, 1927. Oil on canvas. 114 x 162 cm (44.8 x 63.7 in).
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