#4 Home Videos - Allie Frazier

There are things that happen that completely change your life, your soul, your future in one instant. I lost my mother to ovarian cancer when I was four years old, and in that instant, everything changed. (Years later, I gained an incredible step-mom who raised me-- poem/story  on her to follow shortly...) Anyway, I've been grappling with the emotional scars of her passing and how it's affected me my entire life. This is a poem I wrote trying to process what it must have been like for her to realize her daughters would never truly know her except through stories, photos, and home videos she left behind. She was a brave and beautiful woman.


Home Videos
Allie Frazier

My mother is stored
in the box downstairs,
our short life together
saved in two-hour intervals.
Everything I’ve learned of her

(her single dimple, her wavy brown hair,
   her crooked smile
which I wear like fingerprints)
retained in the time it takes to
fast forward or
rewind a tape.
She’s preserved in the movie reels,
patiently waiting for me to

press play,
wanting me to meet her,
to learn how my name
sounded on her lips before the

Cancer broke

her voice.
To see how my sleep-heavy
four-year-old frame
fit into her chest before the

sickness broke

her strength.
My mother,
neatly packaged,
labeled, downstairs,
was hoping
I’d remember these tapes and
I’d forget my last memories
of the hospital room –
   the paleness,
   the frailness,
   the staleness of it all,
and
I’d erase the moment she realized
she could be no more than a

Stranger
leaving the faintest scent of a mother
I would have to track
and discover
on
my
own.

-2008