Cynthia Mitchell is on the faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England and is an advanced candidate in their child analysis program. She has taught courses in “Writing Clinical Cases” and “Poetry and Psychoanalysis.” She served as faculty chairperson in 2006-2007.
Her poems have been published in Kalliope, Riverrun, Pearl, Caveat Lector, and other publications.
Mitchell will be closing her practice in Cambridge and working for New York University in Paris at the end of the year.
The fluidity with which her poems employ time gently washes the reader between past, present, and future in a way reminiscent of stepping into a verbal watercolor.
I read recently that in Turkana land, there is no word for goodbye. You can only say, “I'm going. You stay.”
I have stopped with you and I am going nowout through low fields in the Model Tgrandpop had. Nothing to know then about carsexcept how to stop and how to go. I watch sunlightstreak across cornfields where we walkedhours wrapping the white house and the weddingwhere we ate barbeque and lavender cakesswaying to old songs that spilled outinto the yard. I will make a new house nowa brown house with stone walls and flowers.I will watch spring on new trees and learna new street. Sometimes I wish this were a storyout of order. That walking in the cornfieldsafter the rain were somewhere in the future.
The Hatmaker
In the factory my grandmother sits sewing hatsin the long dark room women curl over their machinesshe presses the foot pedal again and againuntil there is that perfect whirrand the needle descends out and in out and inas she guides the braid round and roundand sometimes when the braid isn't good enough she cursesthe boss, not a good man, she would say, a bad man.In the kitchen each Saturday she stacksrectangular pieces of thick paperin columns of orange green and blueher accounting of what he owescertain hats of shiny strawearn a few pennies more.My grandmother brought home beautiful hatsof spiraled braid and carefully wrapped them in tissueand placed them one upon the other high on the closet shelfand once in a long while she put gold earrings in her earsand traced her lips with color and took one hat down.
Sheri Butler Hunt, M.D., is a graduate analyst in the adult and child divisions at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. A published poet and member of TAP's editorial board, she welcomes reader's comments and suggestions at .