The Maynard
Spring 2020

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Matrilineal

My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his handmaiden: For
behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed.                     —Mary’s Song of Praise: The Magnificat, Luke 1:46-55

In this Coal Harbour café the barista plays
her baby’s fetal heartbeat over

the sound system. I coax the stroller
to a corner table, fold a blanket under the petals

of the sleeping baby’s ears. Out the window
I can see a cook from Cardero’s having a cigarette

on the seawall. Same guy who once grabbed my arm
as I passed, asked if I had a husband.

On the corner, a woman sells bananas
from a plastic bag. A man floats by with a bouquet

of greyhounds. Each of us, our daily intermittent
bursts of purpose. I rifle through the messy purse

that is my heart, offbeat with the swishing speakers.
Find Mary, great-grandmother, named for The Mother

but not hers, Helena, who died of milk fever
one month after the birth of her twentieth child.

I see Mary at twelve, on a footbridge
praying to Jesus. A merganser wallows

in the swamp beneath her, lifts off suddenly.
Someone once told Mary like someone

once told me that the screams of grasshoppers
come from between the knees.

The barista beams, tearful, at me and the sleeping baby
she doesn’t know is not my baby

while she pulls my espresso. Around us, the speakers
pulse eerily. She has just told her coworkers

she’s pregnant. I think of the pink plastic test
in my purse. Congratulations, I say,

sweating stars through the AC.
I seep through my mother’s dress.

Many ways to be named mother, to claim space.
Mary’s older siblings marry,

move away. The rest of the family settles
and unsettles abandoned Manitoba farmhouses

built by Mennonite refugee ancestors in a drowned
land. At night, Mary lies awake. Frogs creak

like hinges. Stormlight radiates across her baby sisters’
faces. Their Foda comes home late, brimming

with whisky. Mary, silent, pours his coffee, tucks
him in, slips out into the wet knit of night

to unhitch the horse from its buggy. In the Bible,
Mary sings, For he that is mighty hath magnified me.

I double tap mechanically on Instagram.
Engagement, job announcement,

ultrasound video shivering
with static. Mary, grayscale in a garden.

These days I don’t know what’s me, what’s
inherited, a dream, the Internet.

As the eldest girl, Mary is too busy mothering
her siblings to go to school, never learns

how to read. Sisters paddle marshlands of stories
with their eyes. Mary sews clothes from kitchen rags,

grasps together loaves of bread with handfuls
of clay loam. Molasses sandwiches, boiled bones.

My mother texts me her dream: warblers for ears—
her children—then they are just her ears.

How’s baby? I say he’ll sleep another hour, maybe,
then I’ll bring him home to his mother.

Google: Plautdietsch word for pregnant.
If a ghost is afterlife then what's

a fetus? What is its possibility? Pre-life,
it settles among us, unsettles and shimmers

unseen. My mother always knew she wanted
children. My sister dreams nightly of bright

canola fields and sweet blonde babies.
Our church basement childhood—Zwiebach and Paska,

sour coffee, songs like “Johnny Appleseed”
and “Follow follow Jesus” thick in our teeth.

And holy is his Name, sings Mary,
or does she? I click through Wikipedia,

skim scholarly discussion, then: Luke portrays her
as the singer of this song. Mary as happy bolster

to a timber-frame story. Humbled
by the weight of responsibility, incandescent

over a surprise pregnancy. Sure.
Or maybe she was more like me. The word

Kjaakjsche ghosts my tongue. To witness.
To be female. To serve. As a nanny,

I weave in and out of tradition. In this café,
in this city 2,000 miles from Mary, I’m steeped

in other people’s spirits. Last week,
baby’s grandmother visited from Cambodia

and the air in the apartment teemed, breathy.
In the future, will he attempt to seize the wisps

of his history? What kind of man will he rise up
to be? Rain flicks at the window. When I look,

baby’s looking too. My mother texts: I’m going for a swim
while the bread rises. In case you try to call.

He hath filled the hungry with good things,
Mary supposedly sings.

At fifteen, my great-grandmother Mary
goes to work as a Kjaakjsche—scullion, nanny

for another motherless family. Another word
for widower—harrow, hunger. Girl

a flash of blue mistaken for a woman.
And his mercy is on them that fear him.

What the body needs. What it means
when he says, De Mana oabeide enn

de Frues hiele. Men work and women weep.
Mary in the kitchen baking Zwiebach—the larger bun

holding the smaller on its shoulders.
Mary weeping. Mary bleeding.

Google: Muttaschkaunt. Muttasproak.
To feed. To bleed into. To bring

into being. As it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be. Mary, nineteen when she marries.

Mary on a footbridge praying to Jesus.
Mourning doves grieve in switchgrass. Mary,

can you already see yourself growing rows
of daughters in a tidied plot? Teaching them

to bake bread with real flour and wild rice and then
dying quietly? To rise up in silence from the dirt, everything

rising. Balloons we released at your graveside
when I was six, my only memory.

I take the test in the café bathroom, stroller
on the other side of the stall. Not schwoafallijch,

just late. Not haunted by one date with a man
who plays teenagers in Netflix movies.

Awash in choice, it climbs the sides of me.
The future is as it always was, a quivering

night lit occasionally by lightning. World
without end. In the illumined instants: A girl

unhitching a horse from its buggy. A girl
asleep. A girl in the frame of a window, reading.

The baby grasps at my dress,
which was my mother’s dress, hungry.

This is not a tidy story. It’s possible
I hoped Mary would make a home

of this poem, this body. Far from the prairies,
I grasp at her like I expect her to feed me.

Like she hasn’t already. Many reasons
women weep. My mother texts: How are you?

and I don’t know what to say.
Grey skirts of rain hike up over Coal Harbour.

Baby waves goodbye to the barista
who is still crying happily.

The ghost of the ocean creeps, salty,
between us, through the strange familiar minutes

we all pass through eventually. On the seawall,
I pray to a disorganized sky

my great-grandmother Mary called Jesus.
Ask for nothing. Offer thanks.