SEPTEMBER 2025, POETRY
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Bones ring the garden like a wedding band.
We made our vows long ago.
The earth, soft and black, smells
of decaying logs. Huts of worms.
It feels like dirt on my knees last summer,
back against a tree, when I learned
how to be an animal in my own body.
How vows are for the breaking.
How to quit wishing on stars
and wrench them out of the sky instead.
Nests of white fire, cold as an icebox,
tips digging into my palms,
I cover them with earth. Dream
of my daughters with stars
in their mouths, running their hands
through the roots of the world.
All of our mothers are dead. All of our mothers
reach for me, bones dancing,
skulls bouncing down the hill. Everyone,
link carpal and tibia. Exhale.
We plunge into the rivers
of each others’ bodies. Back again.
The world blows through us.
Milk, hearth, honey: everything they say
cannot betray you. Everything that will.
We broke our vows long ago.
Eleanor Ball is a librarian by day and writer by night. Her poetry has been featured in Orion’s Belt, Small Wonders, and elsewhere. Come say hi at @eleanorball.bsky.social.
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Behind the Scenes with Eleanor Ball
What was the initial inspiration for this poem, and were there significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions?
E.B. This poem came from Jim Simmerman’s writing exercise “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” originally published in The Practice of Poetry, my favorite book of writing prompts. I absolutely swear by this writing exercise. Every time I do it, I generate such unexpected and exciting material.
Looking back at my early drafts, I’m surprised to see how closely they resemble the final. Like most poets, I fuss over a lot of little syntactical details, but the only major change I made to this poem was altering the structure from one long stanza to couplets. I love long, single-stanza poems, but my enthusiasm for reading them significantly outpaces my skill at writing them.
How does this poem fit into your body of work – is it similar in ways to what you usually write or is it very different?
E.B. Since my grandmother died last January, I’ve been writing a lot about grief and my relationships to her and my mom—sometimes more directly, like in “It’s a Miracle” (Yalobusha Review, issue 41), and sometimes more obliquely, like in “The Skeleton Café” (Orion’s Belt, issue 24) and this poem. “The Skeleton Café” is another speculative poem with a Gothic setting and protagonists who trouble the boundary between life and death, but unlike the woman of “All of Our Mothers Are Dead,” they pretend to themselves and one another that everything is peachy keen. Bottling up their deep-seated griefs keeps them stuck in the skeleton café, unable to move on.
“All of Our Mothers Are Dead” is a speculative poem with a creepy Gothic atmosphere and some dramatic dark magic, but the core of the poem, for me, is a woman who has been through something devastating, is trying to find her way through motherhood, and does not have her own mother to help her anymore. She is separated from her mother, her grandmother, and all of our mothers (spiritual, biological, or both) by a force she cannot conquer—except, perhaps, with hope for the future, rage at the present, and a bit of necromancy.