Chambered Nautilus

by Brooke Herter James

      in existence for over 400 million years and often referred to as a living fossil,
      the animal lives in only the outermost chamber of its many chambered shell


I often think I grew up
in a house with too many rooms—

five for bath tubs, four for beds,
three for sofas, two for books,

and one for the stove in which
my mother cooked the cheese souffle

we ate in the dining room
on Sundays after church.

But perhaps I grew up
in a house with too few people—

a body that never filled its shell—
so when my brother went to Vietnam

and my sister left for Colorado,
we were down to four, counting the cat.

Then my father drove to NYC,
leaving my mother, the cat and me, too

many uninhabited chambers,
the weight of emptiness coiled at our backs.  

At the barely living end of a fossil,
all those shut doors behind us,

we sat on the front porch
in silence until I left for college

and, with the cat in a box on the backseat,
my mother moved to Maine.   


* * * * *

Brooke Herter James is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Widest  Eye (2016) and Spring took the Long Way Around (2019), one prose poetry/photography collection, Postcards from Montana (2020) and one children’s book, Why Did the Farmer Cross the Road? (2017). Her poems have appeared in Mountain Troubadour Poetry Journal, Tulip Tree Review, Orbis and Rattle, as well as the online publications Poets Reading the News, New Verse News, Flapper Press, Typishly and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. She lives on small farm in Vermont.