Renée M. Schell: California Poets Part 10, Three Poems

Renée M. Schell

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Renée M. Schell

Three Poems

Pecha Kucha: Family Portrait with My Mother in the Starring Role

Sisters

Christened Ruth Mabel, she was the middle child of five. She loved to draw, but everyone said her older sister was the one with talent.

Lost and Found

When we cleared out the house, we found all her assignments from art school. The color wheel in careful acrylics, the notes on Cézanne. The pastel study for the boat that still haunts my living room.

Mystery Painter

A fellow student painted her portrait, red hair and green eyes, her hand with its class ring cupping her chin. Who captured her so beautifully, since it wasn’t my dad?

I am not Irish

Two of her siblings had the same vivid coloring, but she scoffed at the idea of being Irish until her brother did the genealogy. Denial is a learned tattoo.

Terra Cotta Head

In sculpture class she molded the bust of a man, his clay hair a rough cliff. Years later, his stare from the top of the piano scared treble clef right into me: Every Good Boy Does Fine.

Bananas

Her first semester she spent the better part of a week drawing a hand in charcoal. The professor erased the whole thing. Looks like a bunch of bananas.

Wanamaker’s

My  mother attended the Art Institute for a year until vows and rings were exchanged. Then she attached price tags to merchandise at Wanamaker’s so my dad could go to graduate school.

St. Anthony’s

Before getting married at 21, she converted to Catholicism. In a wedding photo, the veil is blowing across her face at the church door. She is smiling.

Firstborn Son

My five-pound brother flew from her womb eight months after the wedding. He was early. She sounded exasperated, as if the baby had done this on purpose. Really he’d just been smoking along with my father’s two-pack-a-day habit and wanted out.

Waltz

She loved to dance but my father didn’t. At family weddings they sat at the round tables, rum and coke for her, Johnny Walker on the rocks for him.

Four Children

After each child, her hair fell out. In clumps, she always added, disbelief ringing like a bell. My first guilt.

Recipe

She used to say her kids were put together with pound cake and peanut butter cookies. A family-operated conveyor belt of butter and sugar, chewing and swallowing.

Language

When there was leftover beef, she cubed it into cream of mushroom soup and red wine, calling it beef borgine. To this day it feels like a betrayal to say boeuf bourgignon.

Vowels

Being raised in the south, she sometimes left out the r, like in the word furniture. She said it was because funiture was fun. I dab walnut oil on the cloth and rub it into the rolltop desk.

More Language

When gravel scraped our skin open, she dabbed on an orange tincture with an eye dropper. Until I was twelve, I still thought it was called monkey blood.

Spoon

In summer we picked black raspberries behind the chicken coop, rhubarb and strawberries. The wooden spoon stirred foaming pots of juice and pectin until a thin skin of jam coated its back. The same spoon spanked our backsides when we disobeyed. Or something got broken.

Provence

The summer she was 39, she studied art in France. One time she snuck a sprig of lavender into an aerogramme. She said the postmaster had held it in his hand, given her a look. When I slit open the thin paper, the blossom still smelled like escape.

Sculpture

She returned from France with watercolors of laundry stretched between medieval buildings and a large landscape in oils rolled up in a tube. Her one stone sculpture had been stolen. We felt its loss like a missing sibling.

Fifth Child

Once she’d thought a fifth child was on the way. Dad said to get rid of it. He was done with babies. Luckily it was just a scare.

Long Story Short

At twenty-two I moved to Germany and my hair traveled from waist length to shoulder length to pixie until the mirror revealed a secret I hadn’t suspected. But for being brunette, the reflection in the mirror was hers.

Dispatch from Room 1206                   

Her long hair is matted, stuck together with Nicorette gum.

The shapeless hospital gown billows in from another time.

A voice in your head whispers madwoman. You banish the harsh attic word,

remember your own stay outside the room of reason. Body and mind

fighting like siblings on opposite sides of a civil war. Estranged.

If only the cure were as easy as mustard compresses or sliced onions

bound to her feet. What remedies can this century offer?

Heart rattles its empty cup against the bone cage. Mind— a vacant cell.

Time has stretched like a threadbare sock. She sees you and the wailing begins.

I don’t want to be here anymore. Twenty years evaporate in the morning mist

and she’s seven again, waiting to hear Everything will be okay.

Somewhere her heart has burrowed deep in the earth, a subterranean creature

so accustomed to darkness that only sound can reach her.

Who will compose the tune, put words to the stuttered music?

You take in the moaning the way a leaky boat takes on water.

The pills she swallowed did not slow her lungs to the largo of a funeral march.

She was found in time. Her elbows rage purple from the IV.

Mouth, tongue, and throat throb raw from intubation and shame.

Fortune smiles her broken-toothed smile.

Later, you escape into the night, overhear the dark, low reverb of two owls.

The whoo-whoo sounds overlap like hands clasped, one gently rubbing the other.

In the Parking Lot of Smart and Final                                         

Heading home in the Odyssey and comes a white pick-up truck, unwashed, rusty bumper, barreling toward me in my lane because his is blocked by an 18-wheeler delivering bread. The gap between our vehicles is closing quickly, like the space between two trains in a word problem. Already we’re almost passing each other, our windows nearly face to face. The moment is both magnified and slowed down. I’m trying to remember smells, but I can’t. The moment was gone too fast for basil or oranges from the backseat. And somewhere in that stretched out moment my mother’s voice is reminding me Be a defensive driver but I ignore her words, thinking Why am I always the one to yield? That’s when he rolls down his window. A shaggy beard and uncombed hair jut out from the frame. Snarl-mouth ragged. All but the foam. Polarized sunglasses hide his eyes, reflect my fear back to me. He lets loose with a yelled command, five syllables fired from the chamber of his throat: Turn the fucking wheel! The words fly through my open window, claw at my face. Sound waves rattle my ears, the sunglasses looming oversized and wild. The steering wheel round and solid, warm from the heat of my hands. I roll up the window like a flag that doesn’t belong to me.

every vulva vulnerable

the weather calls

for rage

Author Bio:

Renée M. Schell won the 2025 Slippery Elm Prize in Poetry. Her debut collection, Overtones, was published in 2022 by Tourane Poetry Press. Her poetry appears in New Verse News, Catamaran Literary Reader, Literary Mama, Naugatuck River Review, and many other journals. She was lead editor for the anthology (AFTER)life: Poems and Stories of the Dead. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, she taught for seven years at a Title I elementary school in San José, California.