The mother called Joo-Leeza.

• Author: Schmidt, Lauren
• Position: Poem

The Mother Called Joo-Leeza It took a month before the caseworkers let me meet the mother they called Joo-Leeza: She can't write English enough to write poetry, I was told. She won't want to participate anyway. She doesn't like to be in the group for whatever reason. Not flesh, not hair, not voice, not eyes nor lips, not blood, not bone, the mother the caseworkers called Joo-Leeza was just a name and She can't, She won't, She doesn't. I imagine the mother the caseworkers called Joo-Leeza sitting upstairs in her room. All the other women and I talk poetry at the common table, but while they lower their noses over notebooks, I scowl at the ceiling-high mural. The image: three hands--one brown, one white, one black-- flung upwards, having released a dove to flight. To the right, a manila scroll, half-unrolled, covered with the cursive words of Angelou: The Caged Bird sings with a fearfull thrill Of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on a distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. Fearfull with its double lls and thrill that should be trill: no one cared to correct the errors because the lines are not about clipped wings, nor tied feet, nor bars of rage; they are about those three hands, that flying, that freedom. No other words matter but freedom. So we study the rest of the words of" I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and all of Dunbar's "Sympathy," the old, old scars and the keener sting, then the mothers write poems about their cages and why they think the caged bird sings. I cut myself cuz I am ugly and fat ... I wish I killed my baby then ... I think I might be pregnant again ... And upstairs sits Joo-Leeza: She can't, She won't, She doesn't...