Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This week’s poet is Anna Jollymore.
Jollymore debut her book Words for Becoming in 2025. Her work explores the intricate process of personal evolution, weaving together observation and introspection with tender precision and bone-dry wit. Jollymore is a born and bred Midwesterner who traded the sheep and cornfields of Iowa for the bustling cultural hub of Chicago. She has recently settled in Rockford, Illinois and said she has been blown away by the city’s vibrant arts and literary scene. With a background in both Linguistics and Applied Mythology, Jollymore finds inspiration by drawing parallels between the mythic and the mundane - the extraordinary elegance of nature, spirit, and archetypal story that somehow manages to emerge again and again from the doom and dross of our small daily lives. Here’s her poem “Where Do the Women in My Family Put Their Pain.”
Where do the women in my family put their pain?
It is not stored in our cellars, like
apples or onions or jam.
My mother wears it around her waist like a great innertube.
She lumbers and settles heavily into chairs,
and with bitterness broadcasts plainly that
the weight of all her unrequited longings will quite literally
be the death of her,
and the forever embrace of the too-tight coffin is too little, too late.
Instead, she requests this dignity –
to be incinerated so as to know glowing heat at least once,
to be scattered in the wind and know lightness at long last.
Finally free of all her fears and regrets,
the cold indifference of an unforgiving world,
and her three ungrateful children.
My grandmothers put their pain into their hands;
it flowed down their arms like sticky ochre poison.
It landed hard across cheeks,
so that the small piercing cries of shame and helpless surprise
could be heard externally as a brief exorcism.
Ragged wisps of ghosts that didn’t go too far –
not with stinging handprints to keep the generational curse pressed in close,
like the nettles that grow around fence posts in Iowa.
My sister focused not on the ghost but on the exorcism itself,
excising parts of her self bit by bit,
labeling them in hermetically sealed jars
or pinned beneath glass in memoriam.
She has removed so much by her late thirties
that the rest is now organically sloughing off in dry coils here,
in heavy piles of rot there.
Only in her face, her eyes, does she keep a small piece of identity that sighs
with the relief of a mother who has managed to shield her children from
the waves and waves of radiation that roll atomically
across the wasteland of our family.
She shields her children with her own body, from her own body.
Fragmented, fading, receding ever deeper
into her own shell of a body,
the light in her eyes passing more and more to her children each year
who will know her love by name,
but never her sacrifice,
and that is by design.
Her pain is her privacy, her deliberation,
her strength.
Her demise alone.
And mine?
I’ve scattered my pain like wildflower seeds into ditches.
I’ve smuggled it across state lines.
I’ve passed it on to lovers, and more than one friend.
I’ve used it to burn my candle at both ends.
I’ve resolved to defeat it!
I’ve dissolved, I’ve surrendered.
And now in my 40th year –
I seek to turn my body
into the cup that can hold it gracefully
while it is still potable.
Before the wine turns to vinegar.
That I might drink it and piss it away,
back to Earth Mother as water and salt
and other assorted minerals.
Somewhere in time, the women in my family
forgot how to give their pain back to Earth Mother,
the only mother with a body big enough to transmute it all
without cannibalizing self or other.
I tip my head back and open my mouth up to the rain.
I try my very best to re-member
