To a Tattoo
/Emma Aylor
It’s just a line, really, and from the side
appears to be a crimped string, or nothing
much—a bobby pin with twists worked in,
edge of a broken oak, some given crumble—
though right side up it’s clear it’s mountains, two,
if not ones a person where I am now could know.
The bend in dear land is far from here. The kind
of sky is different now, a clarity I can’t sit beside.
Air should be so thick you can lean your body
along. Sky should be hazed as collodion, bright
and shade etched rare and strange as moved.
This is the world I’ve known. The story:
my mother drew the mountains loved,
Sharp and Flat (once Round), Peaks
of Otter, soft kick off the Blue Ridge, there
middling the back of the Appalachians. The artist
we wanted couldn’t be had, so we, impatient, took
another, a trainee, nervous, who drew the gun down
my mother’s forearm’s thinned skin the way you might
tow a knife on leather. To notch a mark. Mama—it’s late,
I think, for formality, to hide the call—closed her eyes
and smiled. Her line is vertical, up the radius; mine
horizontal, parallel to the elbow crease. And both
a little ruined, as it happens to a body anyway,
the lines bluer and thicker in kind than my older,
neater tattoo. You can see where my mountains
began to be drawn. You can see, hundreds
of miles from here, a match. You can strike
little warmth against the familiar trace
if I hold my arm a certain way
Author’s Note: I wrote this poem in homage to a tattoo my mother and I share, and to Bedford County, Virginia, where I grew up beside the Peaks of Otter.
Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, the Yale Review Online, 32 Poems, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD student at Texas Tech University.
