Mother//Daughter | Briana Johnson

Blooming roses wrap themselves around the metal wounds of an accidental car crash.

Ruffled white blouses splattered with blood flutter in the cool night air.

Iridescent street lamps illuminate the lonely train tracks intersecting the blacktop.

Adjacent to the scene is where she gets her teeth cleaned.

Neither parties look back on that moment frequently.

And sometimes she can still see the blood stains on the heels of her feet.

My mother’s eyelids got ripped off that night.

They never found the kid who did it.

Since this week’s feature includes two poems, I decided to flood the gates with a little more poetry.

Apologies if this isn’t your vibe, but ya girl went through an emotional period about a year ago, and wrote a bunch of poetry. So I definitely relate to genre on a deep level this week. I won’t go into the nitty, gritty details, but…I had a hard time expressing myself in conversation. Or at least, it felt like that to me. It became my only real coping method at the time, and I did a lot of different things with it. This specific poem is called an Acrostic, where the first letter of every line spells out a message or name. In most cases, names or places are spelled, and then described within the poetry. It’s the only poem of this form I’ve written, but it means a lot to me.

Not to say that poetry is a better way to talk through your feelings, but it’s a pretty weird-but-oddly-satisfying way of getting a lot of emotion out in a short–or long–(poetry isn’t all one stanza and vague) piece of writing. It connects to a lot of feelings that are often hard to describe in one sentence, but too complicated to be drawn out in a personal narrative. Or at least that’s how it is for me, I don’t know, maybe you relate?

Now, some backstory about why I wrote this poem.

Like I said before, I felt as if I wasn’t really connected with anyone last year. Never had I felt more at odds with my mom while I was home for Thanksgiving. We’d had a whole summer of fighting, and being away at college for 2 months didn’t really change much. So after a long, selectively quiet break, I still wasn’t too eager to talk to her on the ride back to Ann Arbor. It was silent for most of the way, until we past a car on the side of road, abandoned.

It sparked a question.

“Mom, didn’t you get into a really bad accident before?”

“Oh yeah, it wasn’t good. I laugh about it now, but honestly, I looked like Quasimoto for a while.”

I know it’s going to sound messed up, but I was hooked on every detail. She’d been driving home from my dad’s apartment on the other side of town, the two had just started dating at the time. She remembers going the speed limit. She was wearing one of her favorite blouse-skirt combos, one she finally was able to fit into after rigours months of working out. She never wore it again after that, because she couldn’t get the blood stains out.

A car came out of nowhere and T-boned her.

She doesn’t remember much of the accident, just that her steering wheel was broken, and that her head felt heavy. It was later explained to her that despite her airbag going off, her face had slammed into the steering wheel, and her eyelids had been ripped off. She had a lot of other injuries too, but that was the one thing that stood out. They were able to reconstruct how her face looked, but she said she still looks in the mirror sometimes and sees what she used to look like. She spent a lot of time in physical therapy, and a lot of time hating her appearance.

They never caught the person who hit her.

I’ve never been able to notice the apparent scars on her upper eyelids, but how would I? I hadn’t been born yet. I only knew my mom in pictures, ones before and after the accident, ones too grainy and out of focus to see hyper-realistic facial features. She didn’t take pictures until months after everything had finally healed, and still then she said she was weary to show her face.

To the woman in those photos, no sparks went off in her mind when the word children came up. Nothing told her she’d have a daughter. She was recovering, she was sad. But then I came along, and all of the confusion and self hatred that came along with the accident melted away, she told me.

So I used my name in the Acrostic. Not to sound sappy, or weirdly morbid, but back then, where I felt as if I had nobody, this one conversation started to bring me back. The accident happened on a road I lazily ebb-and-flow between during late night drives; for my mother, that road that has such vivid memories attached to it. And somehow, we pass through that space together every time I come home.

As my mother babbled about the first few months after my birth, I started to realize how much my mom meant to me. I was amazed by her strength. I left the car ride feeling a lot closer to my mom than I had in a really long time, and a bit of electricity flowing through my veins again. I don’t know why, but the sheer fact that I managed to come into a life in such a dark time, without even knowing, baffles me.

Life’s weird, y’know.