micro memoir

by Matthew Stuber

Metanoia, Momma (It’s Awful It’s Nothing Special)

Dreamt last night it was winter ’99 on San Diego shark tooth shores, Momma four weeks pregnant, cast a message in a water bottle to the Pacific. A sea glass breeze blew hair into her eyes, she missed how the tide swallowed her letter, became devastated. I’ve lied here. It wasn’t untrue, but I had to purge the salt water before I could say this right:

In the hospital again, all Momma’s plants die, the dog eats her good shoes, her husband off the wagon still. She misses the ocean, says she could swim before walk, says as a kid she was in a commercial for a water park and shivered the whole time—who shivers in Florida? I’ve never seen her swim. Scars down her shoulders and spine like docking rope, her newer thinner scar like fishing line cut her Chinese tattoo in half, she says it means peace, now it means nothing. When she took my fetus to the zoo for the hippos and I kicked inside ‘til she bruised on the out, did she imagine I’d write about her like this? When I kicked she thought it meant I liked them, so she kept coming back. Momma’s name means peace, flesh foamed around the metal pins brochetting her leg, Momma used to search for peace and would tell me about it, there was this gray fish with its opal stomach rolling out of its mouth and I cast it back to the Pacific, when Momma’s husband relapsed again she told me she’d given up on peace, Momma’s father has Agent Orange blood and maybe that’s why it’s like this, Momma said peace is temporary she wants to learn acceptance, Momma has a sea glass windchime her parents made, it explodes the western suntide, Momma says she’s tired. While writing this I got the call, she’s back in the hospital. I was born two minutes from the water, my first breath was saline. Momma asks what she’s atoning for. I try to tell her it doesn’t work like that, I know she said it rhetorical, I still write the poem, frame it through the ocean, pain scatters out like the tide, right? I don’t know. Hospital air gives me headaches and I wish my mother could have mothered me.

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Matthew Stuber is a transgender Southern poet, raised and currently living in Louisville. He is a senior at UofL pursuing his BA in English, Creative Writing. His poem “Hannah’s a Hematoma” received second place in the 2025 Annette Allen Poetry Prize. Matthew's work is concerned with sonic and formal rigor, experimentation, embodied experience, injury, and environment.