Salt Lick
A poem by Bonita Lini Markowski

Salt Lick

I call her mother.
I am salt
in her wounds:
that she married him,
didn’t know he was a drunk,
that her father laughed
at her wanting to go to school,
that her brother
was the boy,
that her sister
was the pretty baby.
Two ghost babies still
clinging to her.
And damned me,
I, needing to be fed,
I, pulling the life from
her womb, her breasts,
her calloused, Cloroxed hands.
I rubbed her wounds daily
and grew as big as
Lot’s wife

Once, I walked the tarred streets
passed the strippens
to the factory
where she stitched dresses
for ladies who could afford
them; ladies who had time
to bathe in bubbles, who drank
martinis in crystal glasses,
who married men who weren’t drunks.
She sewed hunched
until her lungs turned brown,
tight with fibers that wouldn’t be
coughed up, like her resentments.
And all she could do was stay thirsty,
subsisting long after she’d already died.

I am a salt lick.

About the Author:

Bonita Lini Markowski, poet and educator, lives and teaches in northeastern PA. She received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems have appeared in the Gyroscope Review, PA Bards Northeastern Review 2020, River and South Review, 2021, PA Bards Eastern Poetry Review, 2021, and Sonic Boom Journal, the anthology, The Power of the Feminine I, and are forthcoming in BirdHouse Magazine, and Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology, (July 2024). Her poetry was also selected for the award- winning Poetry in Transit 2023, Luzerne County, PA.

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