"When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs" by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

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.

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When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs 
 
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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