I Am
A poem by Tricia McCallum

I Am

I am from my mother’s bed in a Glasgow tenement,
walls thick with coal dust.
I am from Saturday confession, identical school uniforms, unflinching patriarchy.
I am from melancholy to the marrow of my bones.
I am from not up to it but showing up anyway.
I am from faking it so very well no one ever knows.
I am from a lifetime of hard-won lessons of when to shut up and
when to kick doors down.
I am from finessing the difference.
I am from reading the room the way all women must.
I am from puffers and steroids and Prozac and poetry.
I am from squamous cells and ovarian tumors.
I am from kicked to the curb and too tired to care.
I am from returning home scared to death.
I am from swallowing bile.
I am from too many calm downs and too few stand ups.
I am from too smart for my own good.
I am from you’ll never get a man that way.
I am from childlessness.
I am from bartending and short order cooking and cold calling and
traveling the world alone.
I am from 36,000 feet up serving cocktails in turbulence and
stiletto heels and tight skirts and never spilling a drop.
I am from 30 feet down in dank basement apartments,
I am from a Glasgow tenement.
I am from survivors.
I am from optimists.
I am from losing what mattered most.
I am from unbridled love.
I am from a place called I’m still here.

About the Author:

Tricia McCallum is a Glasgow-born Canadian, a Huffington Post Blogger, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and Best of the Net winner. She has two poetry collections in print: The Music of Leaving (Demeter Press 2014) and Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered (2011). She publishes her prose and poetry online and wherever she can find good homes, blogging about women’s rights, mental health, wretched jobs she’s had (and they are legion), and even more wretched blind dates (also legion).

She writes about almost anything: falcons in Ireland, elephants being traipsed through the Queen’s Midtown Tunnel, stray island dogs, beleaguered mothers, small town beauty queens, and ill-mannered neurosurgeons. Underlying it all is her curiosity about how people navigate their lives and what it is they struggle with under the surface.

Poetry Breakfast is an online journal publishing poetry and short plays.
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