MUSIC FROM BIG PINK
ALM No.91, July 2026
POETRY
Music From Big Pink
“If you remember the ’60’s, you weren’t there.” Robin Williams
That Saturday when she turned three, the morning
of the equinox, the pale sky full of winter shards,
we took a walk to Philipsburg, the eighteenth century
working farm with water wheel and creaking gears
turning the massive grey millstone.
But the history was lost on her;
she cared less for men in woolsey pants
and trefoil hats than for the large, slow-moving
oxen grazing in the distant fields.
(So tiny in her hot pink jacket,
sized 18 months and drowning her - Oh
little pink, my pounding heart!)
It was her first birthday since the adoption
six months before when we had flown to China
to bring her back, this two year old without a home,
who’d gone too long to not belong.
(And she was so smart,
I knew it in my heart—and so adept,
yet still not forming sentences.)
The oxen were still wandering
in the open fields as she was pulling us
towards them. “Ox,”we told her.“Ak,” she said.
She walked right up to one big boy and placed
her face into his fur and dug her hands into his side.
She breathed in, really burrowed in,
then turned her head and cried,
“Mami! Mami! The ak went poopaloop.”
Those hands spread out against his fur,
her tiny face lost in his hide, I will keep until
my last breath; I will take it to the afterlife.
But Woodstock. Living in my room?
I have no memory of that.
Wolfboy
Victor, when he emerged, from the woods in 1800, was possibly twelve years of age.
Those mornings when your foster mom would say
your real mother was coming for the day, you’d jump up
from the bed, get dressed, run to the curb and
sit all day, hungry, cold, not moving ’til
the sun went down and it got dark
and she would never come.
Like the time my dad forgot
the day my baby sis was born
that he’d left my other sis and me, five and three,
still waiting on the front lawn of the hospital for hours.
He thought the laundry man was watching us.
I remember swinging from a branch, the orange
sky behind the tree, the cold night turning
into grey until at last somebody came. . .
I know. It’s not the same. But
we don’t know what people are;
it’s like another world: the trees cut down
the roots all gone, the woods not there to comfort us.
I miss our bed, the snuffled cries,
the bed of needles not that bad.
Susan Demarest, whose poems and CNF have appeared in Hawaii Review, Tar River Poetry, Antiques and Collectibles, Ibbettson Street, Medical Literary Mes-senger, Molecule:Tiny Lit, Hole in the Head Review, Red Skies, L’esprit, Bookends Review, Orange blossom Review and Argyle Literary Review among others, is a musician and educator who lives in Maine. Website: trouvères.net.
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