Name Your Monsters

Aurora Shimshak

Stepmom’s kitchen, stool to reach
the phone. Mommy is something I want
to say now but didn’t say when she told me
Your mom’s beat up. I was just learning cursive,
drew with my finger on the washing machine
the capital L of her name. I wish I had known
to name my monsters. The one climbing
my hair, sticky with pancake syrup,
the one staking a tent in the tunnel of my ear.
Mom was in North Carolina. She was in a shelter.
See what naming can do?
The woman who beat her, a name I knew.
Fred, I could have said. Fred is on the move,
his seven arms slithering all the way down
to my toenails. Fuck Fred to the snow
cupped in my mittens. Mom came back
in a Greyhound. At Grandma and Grandpa’s
we took a Jacuzzi. They were out of town
so she put Madonna on the record player
and we learned the words to Papa Don’t Preach.
In the Jacuzzi, I didn’t want to but I saw
the bruises on her legs. Hush
is something I couldn’t say then.
Late, more Madonna, sang it louder.
Trying to sleep, a monster in the furnace
roaring on. I knew the place, basement corner
poorly lit under the stairs. Don’t to the damp,
God to the rising out from the vents.

Aurora Shimshak grew up in several rural communities and small cities in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2023, Copper Nickel, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She currently resides in her home state’s capital where she studies rhetoric and composition and appreciates badger statuary.