Judson Evans

The Fabric

A stuffed monkey—attached by an elastic leash to my earliest childhood—returns to me today by mail in a plastic tote bag. The thing sewn and re-sewn to deny  time, face polished by greasy touch, velvety red remnant of an O—like the maw that would swallow grandmother, collie, father, lover, aunts and uncles. . . Voodoo doll that does not understand how entirely someone must disappear before they can be reconstructed inside ourselves.

make-up and scarves
in the last photographs—
my mother’s tattooed eyebrows

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About the Author

Judson Evans is a full-time Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches poetry workshops focusing on haiku, haibun, and renku, and a visual studies course on Paleolithic cave art. His collaborative book of lyric poems responding to cave painting, Chalk Song, will be published by Lilly Press, Boston, in fall 2021. He recently became co-editor of haibun for Frogpond.