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 we saw your sister who knew
this was the day she was suddenly big,
bigger than when she went to sleep
because of you,
how you would see her,
all that you would need.
We all thought about what you’d need,
so we arranged flowers, rode in boats,
cleaned sinks, bought apples and washed them.
We talked about your tiny feet
and then your damp-dark hair.
Your morning was water and light,
warm voices and, for the first time, taste.
Ours was final preparation, final prayer,
other things in the world that wanted you,
waited on you,
Books of advice, magazines, secret cures, formulae, strident pages stiff-legged and shouting expert in the public square of the indomitable truth, snapshots of the honeymoon, paradise in silhouettes, champagne, a silver script: it all flares up so eagerly to flame, takes the match like a lover’s hand hungry to dissolve. How urgent to abandon others…
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…
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…
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…
She bought the rugs in Peru where aji amarillo hung like citrine gems in the lobes of market stalls, old women, shriveled peppers, calling to the American girl lank in slacks, the languor of such heat dark in the roots of her hair. She didn’t take a lover there, but loved to listen to the…
Soap bubbles the size of silent whales float and founder from the wand of the prophet. Over and under, rippling in the swells of air, they roll and surge, at play until the pop that pulls them like a sentence back inside the lead. The prophet writes again: in each smooth behemoth a plea for…
