Diagrammer of Sentences

By Mary Kay Rummel ● 2022

Diagrammer of Sentences 

 

In the corner of the living room,

huddled over my pink wooden desk,

brothers fighting, mother angry

because I’m not peeling potatoes,

I’m wandering in English homework —

 

Find the stately subject

a proper start.

What am I—subject or object?

Find the predicate,

its leaping, chaotic verb.

 

Seven of us crammed close

in that small house, bracing against          

winter winds, luminous ice tricks.

 

Modify, shape, change.

Could words change my family?

There is language here.

Celtic roots, English derivations,

West Seventh slang.

 

My mother first gave me words. 

But now when I write my own spells

she reads my journal,

destroys my grave, erotic notes.

 

Wind bangs against the house

in conditional tense.

Cold sets in our pavid bones.

My mother, argus-eyed,

worries scribble her face,

loneliness, a cave in both of us.

 

I want, I pray, I think—

How to parse

a labyrinth of longing?

 

I take my pen and diagram

a live tree, a sideways tree,

a sentence all my own.

 

I lived another time,                  

in a deep world beyond myself.

I will live there again.

 

Artist Justin Hedstrom

 

 

Diagrammer of Sentences by Mary Rummel won fifth place in Saint Paul Almanac’s Break Through Writing Contest in the category of poetry.

Mary Kay Rummel’s tenth poetry book, a collection of new and selected poems, Little River of Amazements, was recently published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. Previous books have won awards from New Rivers Press, Bright Hill Press and Blue Light Press. She is professor emerita at University of Minnesota Duluth and lives in Saint Paul, near the West Seventh neighborhood, where she grew up. She divides her time between Saint Paul and Ventura, CA, where she taught at California State University Channel Islands and was Poet Laureate of Ventura County.

Posted in: Poetry