Issue 001 mother’s mother’s milk

Lucienne Bestall

Mother’s Mother’s Milk

Long may you rest in mineral quiet,
Stillness of calcium phosphate.
Your breathless carbon has become airborne
With your goodness.
My sister says –
You gave us all that did not need to be burned.
And I am thinking of Mary Oliver’s Bone Poem
And what it might be to mix the grit
of skull and pelvis
In a glass of warm water,
Returning to your dust
the wet that was taken from it.
In you, the single cells of our mother’s eggs
Were called into being.
Perhaps those few ova from which we were seeded
Still recalled the cadence of your voice,
Held an impression of your body,
Recognised after the long wait –
The source.
I realise now: You can’t get back inside.
Not inside your mother.
But perhaps the reverse is true,
And mother’s mother might be
Just the saline salve,
Sipped with sand between our teeth,
To return us to ourselves.
Curd-covered tongue,
Taste of stone remembering bone,
Forgetting: soft flesh, your miracle marrow –
The birth canal, so I’ve been told,
Of blood.
Bloodless now, all chalk and chalky whiteness.
And Mary again, saying –
          O holy
          Protein, o hallowed lime
          O precious clay!
Bless these kind ashes,
Their alkaline earth metal and salt.
Bless the milk spilt,
And bless you for the spilling.

Lucienne Bestall is a writer and curatorial researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa. She has contributed to several art surveys from Phaidon and her essay All The Dead is included in the anthology Our Ghosts Were Once People (Jonathan Ball, 2022). Another essay, A History of Fire, was published by Raritan (Rutgers University, 2021) and is listed among the notable essays and literary non-fiction in The Best American Essays anthology (HarperCollins Publishers, 2022). Her debut collection of essays, Except for Breath: Reflections on Image and Memory, is forthcoming from Karavan Press (2024).