For Linda Hamilton

What is a good mother but a series of pullups at bar on a metal bed stood on one end—
Your best mother is incarcerated, injected, molested, dressed in sharp-object-free cotton;

As easy off as the grease on another mother’s suburban oven 
No offense, I had a suburban mother with a clean oven, 

In Hansel and Gretel, one woman’s hearth was clean but empty and another was filthy 
with the sugary taste of children. Here a cannibal’s work is never done; fix the sticky pickets, spit shine the candy-cane gate.

A resilient mother holds her memories snug as a swaddled newborn, forgets neither child 
nor her duties to witness this world, its sentience; the present always senescent, entropic—

Look at the violence of the past birthing the future, Skynet and the singularity, 
the spectacle of AI consciousness and its metallic, genocidal logic. A good learner. 

A wise mother concedes to time travel the work she cannot do alone: the protection, the endless weapons education, the mapmaking. Everything 
a growing child needs to survive the onslaught 
of future termination—like a tide 
that comes in but never goes out. 
A good child doesn’t let his mother sacrifice 
in vain. He eats what she serves. 
He lights her cigarette. 
He counts the ammo. 
He wipes off her blood & field-dresses her wounds, 
her pierced and mortal mother-skin. 
A loyal child sees in his mother every animal-mother on earth 
that has ever lived to fight another battle: winged, clawed, armed. 

•

She lives in my mind like a kind of holograph,
a cinematic doll in the psych-ward-dollhouse, skipping, in socks, 
twirling a nightstick, kinetic, disappearing around the corner,
agile as any girl catching a baton, an aerial extension of her arm.

Every Sarah Connor on every screen in every year and every decade. 
Always resurrected from that soft waitress from the first film, trapped there, too, 
pastel and feather-banged, hunted—not yet pregnant 
with an apocalyptic secret, decrypted knowledge from an electrified future
that signals to us all, that pulses like a heart. 

Just one small mother-woman, in a black tank top, bra: unnecessary, 
belt, dark sunglasses, black cargo pants, black combat boots. 
Busy. Mission ready. Always gathering, always uncovering caches of arms
and diminishing units time to give in future battle; 
she is here and there, now you see her, now you don’t—
but she is inside the world, the film, the feeling: 
a fighter, a fugitive. Every Sarah Connor a replicated oracle,
infinite, a great eye, 
fate unfolded, a menu of hungers: 
it tastes like metal, tastes like sky.  

//

Author’s Commentary:

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, directed and co-written by James Cameron, was released in 1991, and starred Linda Hamilton, who reprised her role as Sarah Connor from the first Terminator movie. 

About thirteen minutes into the extended version of Judgment Day, her son is riding away from his foster father who has, at the urging of his wife, come out of the front door to tell a teen John, “Get your ass inside, do what your mother tells you [and clean your room],” to which John retorts, “She’s not my mother, Todd,” emphasizing that they are his foster parents and nothing more. John and his friend then speed away to the arcade on John’s Honda XR dirt bike. John has broken free, temporarily, from his foster home, and his messy room that he hasn’t cleaned “for a month,” foreshadowing what we’re about to see with his mother in her room, which is white, stark, and empty. 

The next scene opens on a close-up of an imposing limestone entrance sign that reads in all-capital letters: Pescadero State Hospital, State of California: A Criminally Disordered Retention Facility. The camera pans up to take in a long shot of the barbed wire and the compound, which resembles, and is, a prison. The next shot is a close-up of a window with a grille inside the glass, and we hear a woman grunting with rhythmic physical exertion, but we can’t see any person yet. 

The camera then moves into a close-up of Linda Hamiltons’s sweaty, ripped biceps and triceps as she does multiple pullups on the bar at the end of her hospital bed, which has been stood upright. She wears a white tank top and gray sweatpants with her socks and shoes off, on the floor next to her. 

While it’s a highly voyeuristic male-gazey scene, with the creepy “doctor” exhibiting her while giving guests a tour, I’ve always felt that Hamilton’s Sarah Connor’s transcends the libidinous voyeurism of the intended male viewer, as Hamilton’s affect is one of determination, not of sexual display. What makes her character even more unusual for the time and place of the viewer, the early 90s, is that she is a single mother, not hampered by any societal expectations, including laws, as she is a mother on a mission. It’s still a very sexist movie; it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, etc. etc. etc, but we will always have Sarah Connor, in a place where feminine and masculine overlap, in a liminal space for the “insane,” plotting her escape, doing her pullups.