Erasers
The children are erasing
things again,
never doing it right—
I enter the room
to the sight
of their fists pressing
down on pencils,
heads bent over the page,
pushing too hard—
more smudge than blank.
We’re drawing you, they say
when I ask. If you put a pencil
on a table where
children draw
and write, what happens
to their mother? I
mistook
myself for her, letting
them erase me limb by limb
even as they sketched me
out again with each
and every cry,
Mama, mama, mine.
Last night I was reading
De Kooning’s biography—
the part where the author describes
how the artist felt
when Rauschenberg
asks him for a drawing
in order to erase it. To
let something go
because you love the fact of another’s
making more than you love
what you’d already made.
De Kooning said yes.
“It is no use worrying,” he wrote,
“about being related to something
it is impossible
not to be related to.”
Copyright © 2026 by Meghan O’Rourke. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 3, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A friend gave me the prompt of writing about erasers for a themed issue of Pencil, a new magazine. So I began noodling, reading about erasers, and came across the Rauschenberg story. The idea of erasing fascinated me, because traces of what is erased always remain—an apt metaphor for the pre-parent self that lingers in motherhood. Meanwhile, the actual erasing happening in our household was being done by our children, who drew pictures every day after school and erased as they went, endlessly fixing and improving. There was the poem: a literal reality made figurative. But I was too slow for Pencil, so when Poem-a-Day wrote, I sent this along.”
—Meghan O’Rourke
Meghan O’Rourke
Born in New York in 1976, Meghan O'Rourke's first book of poetry, Halflife, was a finalist for Britain's Forward First Book Prize