What Makes a Pearl
Rent from DeepDyve- What Makes a Pearl
When she died, I took my mother's socks,those fuzzy polka-dotted ones she'd worn
in hospice. I wore them all through winter.
Maybe that's creepy. But is it really so differentfrom the necklace she willed to me,
that single pearl clinging to its strand of silver?
The necklace isn't creepy. Every day for a yearI hung it over my heart, even in the shower,
even when it felt heavy as a beggar's first coin.
I want to say that having these things was like having a scarbut worse. In winter, socks are as inevitable as scars,
except there's more choice in it: when I was cold,I chose which socks, and whose.
But I'm wrong. These tokens I harvestedfrom her deathbed are more like the pearl,
or rather, what makes a pearl:
that piece of sand, the irritant that the nacrebuilds itself around, that tiny, everyday object
that, little by little, learns to glow. [End Page 48]
Emily Rose Cole is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches composition and creative writing. She is the author of Love and a Loaded Gun (2017), a chapbook of persona poems in women's voices. She has received awards and honors from Jabberwock Review, The Orison Anthology, Philadelphia Stories, and the Academy of American Poets.
