Rosa Sophia Godshall
Rosa Sophia Godshall is the author of Many Miles: Poems (Harbor Editions). Her work has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sentience Literary Journal, SoFloPoJo, Islandia Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Limp Wrist, and others. She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, through Florida International University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a degree in automotive technology, and she is the managing editor of Mobile Electronics magazine. Rosa lives in Palm Bay, Florida, where she enjoys working on her 1960 Jeep CJ5, repairing typewriters and writing typewriter poetry on demand.
Poem in Which I Learn to Forgive
After Denise Duhamel
My mother digs invasive roots from soil and says, don’t they look like people? She grows eggplant,
watermelon, squash, tomato, and peppers. She won’t prune palms, their leaves a canopy
over the walkway, a shield against wind and rain. She listens to the silence and asks, where’ve the
birds gone? When she gets a staph infection from a thorn in her foot, she’s in the hospital for a
week where she sits and reads The Atlantic by the window. When she comes home, she limps in
the garden. Her hands want to dig. Her eyes want to feast on sunshine and foliage, her feet want
to feel the earth. She says, what am I supposed to do? And I tell her, just sit there and look beautiful.
When she says her father always said that, I tell her his spirit walks the hallway, his blue eyes
piercing time, his head bald from chemo, a tobacco pipe between his lips. My mother says she
woke with a start, thought she heard his truck in the driveway. My first thought, she tells me, he’s
going to beat me again, and what’ve I done to deserve it? The garden shifts like a dream or a
nightmare, branches bending, vines stretching, grasses growing high until it becomes the garden
of her youth enclosed by wooden fences and fertilized by secrets. I’ve learned to let go. When my
mother drinks too much and hurts me, I remember how I found her old bow in my grandmother’s
garden, buried in soil. My father taught me to shoot, my mother says, lifting her toned arms, right
arm straight, left arm bent—aiming at the past as if to end its darkness.
