If I Had A Needle

The trick was rolling the girl both ways at once,
out of the clothes but also into them for in this way
there was almost no sound between them and the silence
was more important than her daughter’s trapped
elbows, her legs thrust backward, her pelvis askew.

The most startling thing was how easy it was
to swaddle the real girl and all the baby ones together
so that she forgot where her daughter began,
ending in a mass of plastic bellies and dimples and boxed-up
cries coming from the bassinette.

The knack of it was learning her daughter was both thread
and needle, collar and sleeve; working out the intricacies
of the girl’s microscopic eye, best threaded quickly, silently,
a tight knot of patience between her brows,
her shoulders aching to unravel the stitches but knowing
she would never be finished unless she never stopped.

But then that sound would come again,
her daughter’s muffled voice calling from
her cottoned-over mouth, red-stitched and raveling,
screaming but stoppered, pink-bunted and frilly,
finished but back, at the beginning, where it always started.That sound between them she can’t stop. –Wicked Alice Print Annual (2006)

 

Catching You

You issued forth blue,
creamy and forceped-bruised,
slightly undercooked,
though I would not know it
till you were six and struggling in school.

I bonded you to me in
the appropriate way of mothers–
my arms and hands filled and refilling with you,
my blond-haired, smiling-plump and tender son.
I lowered you into water, wiped you and oiled you,
powdered and patty-caked you.
I smacked your toddler hands.
I strapped you into seats,
sealed you into plastic pants,
I buttoned and zippered you,
held your hand tight and when you
pulled and pulled away from me,
I snapped you back against my leg.

You are as high as my egg could raise you.
You will never swell beyond your concave and goopy center.
You were fallen in the pan, long before they pulled you out.
You are just able to brush the tips of others,
that world of people you cannot touch in the way
I understand touching. You bump along the surface,
a bobbing, water-logged cork.

And all these years of you perched inside your bubble.
I’ve held you in my mouth, afraid of your popping.
I’ve swallowed you back into my belly,
cradling you there,
cocooning you.

How I’ve hated and regretted you,
Your hold on my life,
your gripping precluding the possibility
that I will ever be free of you.

How I’ve hated the inelegance of you,
the missed beats of you,
the untumbled stones of you.
You scrape against me scarring, scarring.
I harbor a living mistake.
I hide the monster love I have for you.
It crouches inside both of us,
while I push again–harder, harder this time,
sitting up and breathing against my opening bones,
trying to force you loose,
to slacken the strings between us.

But this net I’ve made for you to fall into.
I keep catching you and catching you
and catching you. –Georgia State Review Fall-Winter (2006)

 

God Cleans House

Having divided the mornings
into stacks of three,
he turned to the winter
and its mysterious skeleton,
folding it into steamer trunks
and shipping it off in a western direction.

Summer and night he lumped together;
their warm and dark green wonder
he stored in hat boxes and old coffee tins.
Autumn, with its fire, had to be doused
and stuffed into flannel bags for safekeeping.

Then there was spring,
and for him it was the hardest.
The flowers and rain and wet smells kept
slipping from his hands and onto the floor.
In the end, he hired extra help
and spring was boarded up in crates
and sent across the continent.

When it was done and he was left with
all the middays and midafternoons
and inbetween times to catalog and file,
he alphabetized them all and assigned them
to a committee of storage experts
that he had located through a temporary agency.

The seconds he counted on his fingers
like a child.
He is at it still,
with a one-two-three rhythm,
and it pleases him. –Comstock Review 16:1 (2002)

 

Our Habit of Holes

When they ask us, we will say it is our habit
to make holes and to fill the holes in and to
gouge them out again into new holes on top of
more holes. We’ll say the holes are to blame for
the holes, for our habit of putting holes into the
world is what we’ve always done, what we’ve
become accustomed to–throwing things out
through the holes, putting tiny holes over the
bigger holes to blot them out in a series of better
holes stretching out behind the previously unsatisfying
holes we’d made before we understood the importance
of making perfect holes that make sense when we snap
them over our eyes and look out through the holes.
We’ll say the holes are inevitable, are our habit, the way
it’s always been, all these holes we keep slipping through
and down and into deeper holes and burrowing our way
out and into larger and more glorifying holes to
crawl through on our way into other holes. –The Adirondack Review 4:3 (2003)

 

Land of Dead Babies

This poem is about dead babies. There are dead babies everywhere.

Dead babies can be very ugly. They do not look good in pictures or wastebaskets.
They make terrible billboards and posters. But made into shoes they become beautiful, into sweaters and purses and jackets and jeans. Dead babies make the best jeans.

Dead babies can be very useful. They’re pretty good missile weapons and
if you can find enough of them, they make excellent ground cover.

I know a man who crushes dead babies into mirrors and calls them art.
I know a woman who sews dead babies into lampshades for history lessons.

Do you know that the president always wears ties made of dead babies?
They whisper to him while he speechifies, he fumbles and they laugh.

Dead baby laughter is not funny.

No one likes to hear their goo-goo-gaaing and gurgling.
Nobody wants to hear a dead baby whisper.
At important functions, wise hostesses distribute ear plugs.
During sermons, fierce praying drowns them out.

Some dead babies have been genetically-modified to resemble your sisters and brothers.
Some dead babies have been pulled from black hats and resemble doves.

Me, I hate all these dead babies stuck to my clothes. I’ve tried everything to wash them away but they leave terrible stains. Usually I just chuck them out, but even under plastic dead babies cause a terrible ruckus.

But some dead babies are great for snacking, the calories have been calculated and are low. And that dead baby taste, can’t beat it. Whenever I need to, I pull a dead baby out and smoke it and I feel so much better.– Barrelhouse Review (2007)

 

Daughter Like Me

 

There must be a billion daughters just like me. Afraid to speak. So many years have piled up. Did I ever have a voice? Before I was born, did I talk to the stars? Maybe then I understood the sound of blood moving through a body, a million reasons to stop searching for a million different moons to capture. If only I were interested in the moon’s path cutting the undersides of the lies. I think I’ll grab my markers and trace my hand to make a Thanksgiving turkey. I never did that before. I never saw Lassie Come Home. I never understood the rules for Easter egg hunts. My father used to hold me on his knee when the world was large enough to taste like lemons and the feeling of his hand on my hair. Let me explain. When I was small enough to fit in his mouth, my father swallowed me. That’s why it starts to end whenever I begin to find my way around it but I always end up walking through the gate and over the same hill. When I listen hard enough I realize how many daughters it takes to lift up the corners. One to grasp the meaning, another to stop up my mouth. All the rest keep silent while I hold up the quilt and he slides under.–Diode 1:3 (2008)