Ellen Elder has degrees from The University of Chicago, Miami University, where she received The Academy of American Poet's Prize, and The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she received her PhD in English. She spent her summers growing up in Ireland. Her fiction was nominated for the 2006 Best New American Voices and her poetry can be found online at Exquisite Corpse and DMQ Review and is forthcoming in The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems (Red Hen Press). She is at work on a poetry collection about her mother.

Finding My Mother's Dildo, I Contemplate My Inheritance

I.
Unlimp or not
pimped or not
packaged, unpackaged,
It's the lips I spot first
the pucker cautious amongst
lace slips, bra silk,
musk-worn stockings.

It's pink and one of many,
like kittens in a litter.
Its rubber resiliency
weighs like the wallet
my mother placed
in my hand
at the store:
Don't you see
anything you want?

But her last restless whimper
I let scab to ash
in a Virginia oven.

II.
A silver heel
dances on a mirror.
Hers was mine as
much as mine was hers.

Dildo. I sound the word
as if it were
a Greek Goddess.

Slit one cunt,
slit two.

Troops graze my skirt.

III.
The statute of limitations
excuses a motherless house.

Like my grandmother said,
buttering white toast,
make your bed in case
the doctor comes.

My mother bathed in lotion.
She had time to prep me.

A rose in a glass box
is always
a rose in glass.

In a nutshell.

IV:
So many mothers:
Some teach you to run

others
pantyhose control.

Mine taught me pleasure and pain.

Tell me,
what else is there?