Pedigree

What was it I wanted from them,

those who made me, those who

wove a bag of need out of the tendrils

of my hair, kept in a drawer for 40 years

The dust threading the brown silk. What

was it I thought they could do—buyers

of blue glassware and old honey, of money

hidden in the pages of Dickens, of letters

folded in the back of closets that smelled

of cheese. They do not sing the old songs,

standing at the window to watch the citrus

blossom, fruit, then fall. They do not remember

the light across the saw palms in summer,

how they held rain like resin in the violin’s bow.

Surprise

Nausea each morning, how I stagger
to the kitchen to make toast, the wildflower

bouquet I picked darkening the glass jug
murky green, my body in argument with dawn,

my body sickened with the leaking air conditioner,
the cat perched on her haunches on the one small

patch of rug that lies in shadow. I don’t know
what my body wants from me. Is it afraid of change,

haunted by the specter of all that has killed the women
I love, or is it the soft arms and skin of something smaller,

something that came unbidden into my body to grow in darkness?
O closet of this body, how many secrets will you shutter

from even yourself? Your wants, your selfish wants, all that is
small and soft, the sugar licked clean from a mouth that isn’t yours.

Another Word for Duty

There’s a simple pattern to growth:

fallow, fallow, fallow, then fruit.

Hollow spring days spent as a seed

resting on the surface of soil, the surface

blue as an eggshell. How could she have known

how deep she would have to go to take root?

She asked to help with the dishes. She asked to slide

deeper into the dirt. You came up behind her

and whispered—I see you. Everyone thinks

you’re kind but you are not. She kept washing

the plate, its white ceramic sheath, its tender

foam. She held on to keep from breaking it.

She held on to keep from breaking. She scrubbed the lip

of the mason jar. She worked the lid’s brown rust.

At the sink she gave birth to a self that hid like a worm

under ferns, curled fist beneath a cover of green,

skin green, eyes still as cut geodes, dormant

as a broken black walnut, as a volcano.