Theresa Monteiro

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021

Getting an Education Theresa Monteiro

Last night, reading, I came across the word thistle, but I’ve forgotten the context because I couldn’t, and can’t, call up the image of a thistle. I feel this lack in myself—like the shame of never understanding imaginary numbers or what chemists mean when they talk about a mole. Mrs. Clark was childless, broken, and this girl kept asking, what’s a mole? Six point zero two times ten to the twenty-third power, of course. An unimaginable number but not an imaginary number so I try to imagine a mole of thistles but can only recall like the down of a thistle which is not the thistle itself.

Mrs. Clark, I understand now, at wakes, wanting to reach inside the caskets—to give the bodies reassuring pats, mumble to them a mole of motherly things. The rooms choke on lilies, carnations, baby’s breath, small purple blooms like pom-poms, and now it comes back to me: You will know them by their fruits.

Theresa Monteiro lives in New Hampshire with her husband and six children. She is a former teacher and holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She has had poems published in The American Journal of Poetry, River Heron Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Black Fork Review, Good Fat Poetry, Silver Needle Press, and forthcoming in The Meadow and Presence. She received the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for poetry in 2019.

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