"When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs" by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach2/11/2022 ![]() Julia Kolchinksy Dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019), finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and recently relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas with her two kids, cat, dog, and husband. When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs
how sometimes I don't love them their careless smell of childhood & sudden bloom their sweetness lingering to rot & sometimes I don't love his grandmother who always loves lilacs & smells of them when making threats of suicide if I marry the man who will become his father & all the lilacs in her garden will die if I move away or say the words I don’t & sometimes I don't love coffee if it's gone warm or the bed when I am too far from hitting it or the pillow sometimes I fucking hate the pillow when I bite it when making love isn't actually loving & I won't say fuck in front of him no matter how much I want to or tell him that sometimes I don't love his mouth & hands biting & scratching his head of curls drilling into my stomach or slamming into the wall & sometimes I want to tell him all the things I do not love but instead I reassure him after each I don’t love you, Mama, how much I do I do I don't know how to love without him how the lilacs will keep coming year after year how rot is its own sweetness
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