Spy Poetry: Helping My Daughter Move into Her First Apartment by Sue Ellen Thompson

Editor’s Note: The mother in this poem is working very hard to connect with her daughter at this important juncture in both their lives. Her physical exertions seem to be a stand-in for the emotions and words she can’t say. The images do a powerful job of conveying both the mother’s sadness—sagging carton, slumping rice and lentils, stooped and pinned body—and the daughter’s remoteness—the spiny cactus—while the last line’s poignant image reveals the mother’s sense of failure. 

Helping My Daughter Move into Her First Apartment

This is all I am to her now:
a pair of legs in running shoes,

two arms strung with braided wire.
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs

at me and I accept it gladly, lifting
with my legs, not bending over,

raising each foot high enough
to clear the step. Fortunate to be

of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed,

with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me,

sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner,
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks

of rice and lentils slumped
against my heart: up one flight

of stairs and then another,
down again with nothing in my arms.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of six books of poetry—most recently SEA NETTLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS. She has taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, Wesleyan University, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Delaware. A resident of Oxford, MD, for the past 19 years, she has been mentoring adult poets and teaching workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. In 2010, the Maryland Library Association awarded her its prestigious Maryland Author Award.