Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs,
slipping her hands beneath the white feathers,
biddies murmuring in prayer.
The warm globes felt like hers, the same way
the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck
did not surprise her, the same way
the knife had missed her toe –
of course it had – when her brother threw it.
Inside, the blade stood sentry
in the floorboard, witness
to all that she refused to lose.
She knew what she deserved:
salvation, not for good works, but purely
for faith that the world was lovely,
that it held things like starfish she had never seen,
but would, one day, so far from this Missouri dirt
that she would feel she’d lost a limb, remembering
that what we need grows back, casual as scattered seed.
I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape. I would use the word secret, but it makes him restless, as though he were a child and I used the word tomorrow; as though he were dying and I used the word tomorrow. I walk the house I built before…
Three, today, is the happy morning number of soggy robins in the closest tree, new blooms on damp petunias, cups of tea I’ll drink as I thumb Genesis, again, to keep on learning how creation’s never through. On the third day God made ocean and dry land, vegetation, plants and trees – mad synthesis of…
Third Draft: In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother “Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits. Even my resolve not to have babies, elegy, effigy, small…
for Claudia at 5 hours old There were two kinds of mornings the day you were born. We had the other. We whispered about you in bedrooms and then we talked in kitchens. We did laundry, folded sheets thinking about your hands, how they would be so small. We paired sock with sock and then…
for Janet Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again and you are free to tear through reedy fields shouting now, now, now at diving chickadees as if you were a dog awakened after death passed by, and now, all paws akimbo, means this time a sacred work, a wishing well, a friend…
Look in the mirror. Practice saying you’re beautiful. You must say this out loud – you must say this one thousand times until your face believes you. You must say this and see the glorious and wounded contours of the human frame, your broken nose and hooded eyes, creased skin, your crooked teeth, you must…
