Aubade: My Mother Calls Home
- Aubade: My Mother Calls Home
An mmhmm is softer, sweeter than yes—out of my mother’s mouth, a bright song—how beautiful, this flavor of English, bestserved over the phone, best from Mother, nowmiles and miles away from home, Greensboroand its clay, its quiet constellationof field flowers, the unrelenting glowof porch lamps, lemons filled with light—the sunis a dull bulb in comparison. Today,I wake to my mother’s voice, her sisteron the other side of the line. There’s acomfort in knowing that these words can stirthe air until they feel like a mother’stongue: warm and loved enough to drop some r’s. [End Page 101]
ashley m. jones is the author of Magic City Gospel, published by Hub City Press in 2017, and dark // thing, published by Pleiades Press in 2019. Her work appears or is forthcoming at CNN and in the Oxford American, the Mississippi Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship, Jones is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she codirects PEN America Birmingham. She teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. *
