Tag Archives: mother loose

“Returns & Exchanges” by Brandel France de Bravo

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mother_loose_cover_thumb-167x258I’ve been in and out of stores
shopping for a metaphor
but can’t find what I’m looking for.
You say: My joints hurt.
I say: You need a new roof.
You say: I can’t swallow.
I say: You’re behind on your payments.
You say: I’m out of breath.
I say: the Bank wants it back.
You say: I can’t feel my toes.
I say: Let’s fill the john
with cement mix
and storm out to the applause
of the half-hinged screen door.
It turns out foreclosure
wasn’t what I wanted.

The customer is always.
With a credit to my account
I’m driving on an eight-lane highway,
faster than the speed limit,
semis like linebackers on either side.
You say: My joints hurt.
I say: None of the stations are coming in.
You say: I can’t swallow.
I say: Adjust the sun visor.
You say: I’m out of breath.
I say: look for a rest stop.
You say: I can’t feel my toes.
I say: Something’s trying to pass us.

We both can sense it
in the blind spot,
how it will overtake us.

-Brandel France de Bravo
Mother, Loose
(Accents Publishing)

brandel_france_de_bravo_thumbBrandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance, which won the 2008Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry and was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her poems, which have been nominated for thePushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review,Gulf Coast, and Seneca Review. She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College with a master’s in public health, she works for a consumer health organization in Washington, D.C.

“The Night Kitchen” by Brandel France de Bravo

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mother_loose_cover_thumb-167x258It all began with a sleepless moon
counting cows and covering the counters
with sudsy light. The dented and rusty
still speak of that night, how back in the day
they used to dine with the dish and spoon,
and the young follow in their footsteps:
the trivet eloped with the teapot,
the spatula proposed to the pan,
and somewhere, they say,
the sieve and whisk are shacking up.

But the carving knife keeps company
with no one. Head buried deep
in a wooden block, he shuns the dull
familiar, this futile utensil love.
Let them tie their knots. He will write
mash notes to occlusive consonants,
the plosive “d” of divide, divorce
and … Sometimes at night
he can be heard moaning softly,
stirred by the glint of memory:

the firm grip of the farmer’s wife,
the three tails writhing,
the mice who never saw what was coming.

-Brandel France de Bravo
Mother, Loose
(Accents Publishing)

brandel_france_de_bravo_thumbBrandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance, which won the 2008Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry and was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her poems, which have been nominated for thePushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review,Gulf Coast, and Seneca Review. She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College with a master’s in public health, she works for a consumer health organization in Washington, D.C.

“The Old Woman in the Shoe” by Brandel France de Bravo

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Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo

Moored in bramble but still I tell them “row.”
What else can I do with these charges,
bothersome as bunions? In the dark of the hull,

their sequin-sweat catches light, and they turn
orphaned faces toward it, gulping air
from the open portholes. I removed the laces

after Dimple Dan died, hid them below deck.
Oar-breath and the clatter of shackles keep time,
as one by one the children fold, forehead to knees.

Singing softly, I carry the weary to the bow
where five cots wait and pitch the dead
into the toss and roil of thorn. Life is a tight fit.

For dinner I give them broth, shouting,
“Cup your hands. Them that’s got the will
knows not to mind the scald.” What does not leak

is lapped, but the bread is mine. I eat the crust,
throw away the rest for all to see, and search
the horizon with my glass, squint for delivery.

Hear my lullaby: someday, the anchor will lift.
This cargo a memory, I will let my sails out,
pull them taut as I see fit. Captain of my shoe,

my tongue will take me where I want to go.

-Brandel France de Bravo
Mother, Loose
(Accents Publishing)

brandel_france_de_bravo_thumbBrandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance, which won the 2008 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry and was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her poems, which have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review,Gulf Coast, and Seneca Review. She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College with a master’s in public health, she works for a consumer health organization in Washington, D.C.

An Interview with Brandel France de Bravo

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Accents Publishing: Throughout Mother, Loose, you are working with characters borrowed from nursery rhyme and fairy tale, as well as inventing characters within those worlds. And in doing so, you give what are often considered old children’s stories a more mature, modern context. Readers will encounter Mary and her lamb skipping school to go to the mall, and find that the dish and the spoon are only a small part of a larger utensil community full of fulfilled and spurned loves. What makes these “children’s” rhymes so compelling to you as an adult? In thinking about bringing children’s rhymes to an adult audience, how do you hope your poems will alter a reader’s view of these stories and characters? Is it elaboration? Subversion? Something else entirely?

mother_loose_cover_finalBrandel France de Bravo: I am fascinated by Mother Goose rhymes—they way they stay with you, like a baby tooth that lingers into middle age (I have one of those that’s finally giving up the ghost). The simple rhymes bring bodily joy—to repeat them is to remember pumping your legs on a swing.  While their forms are tight and unwavering—closed even—there is something Steinian and open-ended about their nonsense-wisdom. After all these years, I still find many of them mysterious, as though they were excerpts or fragments from a larger narrative. All those Jacks, each with his own story: the one who went up the hill, the one who sits in a corner, the thin one with the rotund wife. They beg for, if not completion, amplification. Continue reading →

Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo

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mother_loose_cover_finalAccents Publishing is proud to release Brandel France de Bravo’s Mother, Loose. Mother, Loose was selected by Patty Paine for the Judge’s Choice award in our 2014 chapbook competition. In the foreward, Patty says that she was, “struck time and again by how France de Bravo transports the reader from familiar to utterly unexpected contexts through startling imaginative leaps and unexpected metaphors.”

Mother, Loose plays with familiar nursery rhymes. Poems with titles such as “The Old Woman in the Shoe” and “Jack Sprat” give the reader a general sense of the stories being explored, but Brandel gives her unique perspective. As Sandra Beasley commented, “Nursery rhymes become impishly twisted.”

Ladybird Ladybird Fly Away Home Your House Is on Fire

standing by the flowering white yucca between
Christmas and New Year’s in a valley surrounded
by mountains like Chinese scroll paintings
phone in my hand standing in the garden of
a house I no longer live in my mother says
“x-ray” her dry cough flowering unremarkable
except for its constancy walking less the year before
a winded valley surrounded by mountains until
the smokeless fingers grew bulbs (they called it
“clubbing”) sent smokeless signals “please”
I said “see someone” and after Christmas the
house I once lived in phoned the garden saying
“x-ray” like a painting “mass” white as yucca.

You can purchase Mother, Loose from the Accents store or find copies at neighborhood bookstores, such as the Morris book shop or The Wild Fig.

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance, which won the 2008 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry and was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her poems, which have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and Seneca Review. She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College with a master’s in public health, she works for a consumer health organization in Washington, D.C.