by Doritt Carroll

the deacon at church looked like Mister Rogers if
Mister Rogers had a really bad day same
beaky nose, gaunt cheeks, the swoop
of hair but instead of the one-sided smile the lips
were pressed together like the wringer
on an old-fashioned washing machine or maybe
there were two different Mister Rogers and finally
the bad-tempered guy got loose

I used to think that—that I had two mothers
and every night they fought and the one who won
locked the other one in the closet because how else
could you explain that on Tuesday we were painting
with watercolors making fish faces trying to suck
our milkshakes up our straws but by Wednesday she was ripping
the pages out of my father’s books and snapping the necks
of his cigars screaming that my neck was

next I told my father my idea about the two
mothers and my father told me to cut the crap
because only a childhood schizophrenic would split
their thoughts that way and since I clearly wasn’t
a schiz I needed to stop reading his medical journals
and making up bullshit diagnoses for attention I never
thought my father was two people he was
always just like that

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Doritt Carroll is the winner of the 2023 Stephen Meats Poetry Prize and the Laura Lee Washburn chapbook prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

by Doritt Carroll

the church had a slogan for it: JOY, meaning
that one tried to please Jesus first, then Others,
and only if there was time left over Yourself

later, after i had given up, i called the mothers’
group that met in the rectory basement
the Martyrdom Olympics if i mentioned

i’d been sick every other mother had been sicker
and while deathly ill also had driven one hundred
fifty miles for sports drop-off and iced three

classrooms’ worth of cupcakes on the way
when they asked how many children i had
their response always was the same—“only

two?” not just because it suggested I was using
birth control but also because it meant i wasn’t
suffering enough one of the expressions everyone

repeated was “offer it up” meaning give your suffering
to God and one time i made the room fall silent when
i blurted out “but why would He want it?”

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Doritt Carroll is a native of Washington, DC. Doritt is the winner of Harbor Review’s 2020 Laura Lee Washburn prize for her chapbook, A Meditation on Purgatory. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Main Street Rag and RHINO, among others. Her collection, GLTTL STP, was published by Brickhouse Books. Her chapbook, Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner, was published by Kattywompus (2017). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.