in a spot of warm sun.
“We won’t be a bother,” the foreman had shouted from
over the fence as I as pulled tomatoes that Wednesday,
the last time I saw that tree.
I’m afraid you will, is a thing I could have said.
Tuesday Morning on the Way to Rehab
This is the you I will press to a clean new sheet of memory,
you asleep with your shaggy head against the dirty car
window—do you remember when I still cared to stop
and to wash things?—and with this newly exploding
sunrise in the glassy space beyond you, as pale as
you, as ignorant as you of a future I fear may not
include either one of us. Or maybe the memory
to keep is three years ago, when you were just
beginning to fall apart, when I was still sure
that there were so many chances, so many
chances out there for you. It’s getting late
and we should hurry, now. You are small
and changing fast, reducing. By sunset
you will have shrunken back from the
framed edges of this picture, farther
than you were yesterday, farther
even than you were early this
palid morning, less you than
just an instant ago—please,
is there no way to save it
now?—there is all of
this history and I
have nothing but
you to keep
it in.
Ways We May Have Been Wrong
I am watching your sister through the window, waiting for the bus.
The rising sun behind her has caught her in such a way that the
space around her has been set afire. I step away, intending to pick
up the camera to get a picture, but then stop, and decide only
to just be present.
You are not here and today is your birthday. I remember the day, I think
it was in the second grade, that I sat waiting on the front stoop for your
own school bus to arrive, and when it did you ran fast down its stairs
and up the walkway to where I sat, and with wide, frightened eyes you
cried: my friend died yesterday. He was seven, and had only been walking
home, only walking home—I can still hear so clearly that only—and he
just collapsed, and that was that. I remember feeling as we clung together,
and I think you did, too, that this is what made life the scariest thing.
Your birthday. When I was pregnant with you, had just begun to round out
in the belly, my back pulled in to follow as you stretched us both out into
unknown territory, and it was then that I felt the deep foreshadow of this
place where we live now, and so I sat down to write a poem. It was rough,
I was young, only twenty. But it was all you and me, all superhero duo and
scrappy fairy tale. I still believe in that version of us. Maybe just not in quite
the same costumes, now.
When you have made your bed, when you have finished with today’s group
and the nurse has watched you take your dose and sent you out into that
unnaturally bright and crowded room, please call. I’ll sing.
Occlusion
I take a swipe at your tight face
pull it back, brush the dustings off—
you were 22 then, your bright smile
gone fallow, your eyes anemic and
retreating.
I pinch the features hard, try by
brute force to bring you back to
your surface, to pull you forward
and out into this very particular,
particular light—
this place I have shaded
by not shading, drawn by
drawing around you,
more screened,
more diffuse, I see now,
than chiaroscuro.
Lisa Beth Fulgham
After They Sold the Cows, But Before They Cut Away the Pines
Wine-fed and lying in truck beds thrown open,
we had gathered in a field to watch meteor showers
but first noticed the moon, halved
and upward-facing like a bowl to hold
every flinch, every shiver, every amen come Sunday.
Firelight would have drowned out the celestial,
so we grasped at each other for warmth.
We played geography, we played guess-the-headlights,
we played sing-the-tree-line-to-sleep.
We awoke with the warblers at dawn, dew seeped
into the openings of our sleeping bags.
Together, we excavated the remnants of the night.
Blushing and lacking pavement to guide us,
we drove along the barbed-wire fence,
hoping to cross it as we had the night before,
without piercing our skin.
The Choctaws under the Bed
The picture was boxed in forest green and dust,
waiting to be discovered in the space beneath
my grandmother’s brick-hard mattress.
Man and woman, field-worn and dark-skinned,
they glared at me. These two stood upright,
holding their half-filled baskets in front of them.
Behind them grew rows of cotton.
And I wondered, if they could see me,
would they string beads in my straw-like hair?
If they could see me, would they touch
this skin that the sun bites into, chews,
and spits out? Would they scold
me for slouching and step forward
to straighten my spine?
Would they teach me dying
words that would hang in my throat
like phlegm in Southern spring?
Would they say Oh my, how you’ve grown,
we remember . . . or just return to their work,
pulling at the bolls more forcefully?
Justification
It’s ok because I only count
when I’m bored, she says, noticing
every percussive pen click against
legal pad from across the gap
between her and Dr. Drivel.
Behind her back she lifts
and curls her fingers in multiples
of three with each beat.
The inspirational posters and books
with well-worn spines don’t distract
enough from the floor tiles, arm freckles
and kaleidoscopes that need to be inventoried.
Just like the asphalt and white
lines of highways are not enough
to keep her from turning her attention
to the passing cars as she paces home.
There is not enough time to number them all,
to make sure that she’s seen the correct
amount before she can go inside.
So she takes the longer way, dodging
through alleyways and neighborhoods.
She turns the knob back and forth
three times before heading indoors,
announcing her arrival.
It’s ok because at night I can rest,
she says, turning the light off with
the normal click, click, click.
She turns over three times
like an alligator in a death roll
with a dog,
and gives thanks for the dark,
and gives thanks for the dark,
and gives thanks.
A Strange Offspring
Junior high experimenter,
wisp-banged boy who swabbed
the corners of my locker
while I stood, kicking at a patch
of dried gum on the short, grey carpet,
/> if then I could have seen the bacteria
swelling in shades of white, green,
and yellow, I wouldn’t have volunteered,
raising my hand and wiggling my fingers
under the fluorescent lighting.
Later, we gazed at the Petri dish,
a fertile culture blooming
below us, condensation
lapping the lid.
A girl chortled
two rows over, called me
moldy Mona. You slid
your nails underneath
the tape, opened the container,
and released our spores.
Found after the Sudden Storm with Straight Line Winds
This light switch, useless.
That half-green, half-rust
lawn chair lost.
Torn bits of yesterday’s news:
the school’s successful play,
the congressman’s unsuccessful affair.
Power lines snaked
across the asphalt.
This pup thrown
against the shed’s aluminum side.
This house halved by a pecan tree.
Parking lot puddles reflecting
our cheeks, the sun.
This corn crop’s thirst quenched.
These ponds teeming,
this conversation overflowing.
Mary Mills
The Practical Knowledge of Women
A pragmatist
to all appearances, my father
has spent his life
with steel and fire
but again brings out the little bird
and trusts her to her mate,
her life the size of a wine cork
and fragile as apple blossom.
“He misses her,” he explains,
and it is I
with my supposedly impractical education
who can see the mistake.
She spends a week or so
in the larger cage,
sleeping beside him
on a spindly branch
and it convinces my father,
but not me.
It is the practical knowledge of women:
the man who will pluck a feather
will pick your wings bare,
and he who will nearly kill you
will kill you, eventually.
My father believes in love.
So do I, but I also believe
in the bone-cold January days
I spent in an old farmhouse
away from a sharp beak.
I believe in many things
that only look like love
from odd angles, that cannot be
proven beyond any shadows,
but speak the lack.
I believe
in the bare places
where feathers
have never
grown back
Peas
My mother could make me eat peas,
but not chew them.
I must have swallowed a gallon
whole like medication,
her motives
vitamins dipped in gall.
Later, she could make me tell her
events, but not how I felt.
I’d hold crushes or despair in my mouth
for hours until I could excuse myself
to the cold altar of the bathroom,
offer up the green
flesh of my teenage heart
to an empty room.
Even now, she tiptoes
around perceived scorn,
recoils from the black pits
of old fires
as if the specter of their heat
still frightens her, as if
they might reignite
spontaneously
and swallow her
whole
Earth from Space
I love best alone,
our apartment
at the bottom of the hill a sunken glow.
There’s our life,
I want to say (but don’t). We watch the glass door,
waiting to see
ourselves walk by, inside,
astronauts watching Earth from space.
It reminds me of you
last winter, on skates—
how I expected your clumsiness,
but you glided away. How you looked
from the long end of the rink:
oblivious, distant, whole in a way
that crushed my ribs like paper.
I’m never
this close up close, I didn’t want to say.
30,000
Pushed off
like a swimmer from a pool wall
deep into a cold ripple
of burned pearls.
Our flying dollhouse.
I pretend to read
but how?
the lush whirl of earth, below;
my eyes drag back
like dogs pulling leashes,
resentful of my insistence
on the banal.
my god, I think, listening
for the silence
that coats the world,
but the engines
bored as cattle
lumber on. My open book
tells its story
to the wall.
Monika Cassel
Waldschatten, Muttersprache
(in memory of Erik Cassel)
The tree is broken in the light.
Every rose folds shut—
Quiet, they say,
like the face of the woman
who looks up from her reflection in the forest pool
to gaze at you, at me, to hear the veery’s call.
You asked for dark and light, for here and gone.
The veery’s notes resound unseen;
they haven’t asked you here
to tender me again with yellow petals.
Marsh marigold, Dutchman’s breeches, lady’s slipper,
chilled medicines I tucked under your tongue, your tired whisper—
These are the hard coins of our dreams:
fish-breath, rain-slept, heart-kept.
Thrift, ca. 1946
“Die Fahne Hoch,” (“Raise the Flag”) co-anthem during the Third Reich, was composed by Horst Wessel, Nazi hero/martyr, and outlawed in Germany after 1945.
She made me a new red dress
when the schools opened again:
pulled the old flag out from a drawer,
clipped the stitches
from the circle in the center, held it up,
shook her head
at the black spider,
“good fabric
and a pity to waste it
but there’s just nothing
I can make out of this,”
spread the red rectangle
and cut the pattern;
just enough.
A lot of girls wear red
these days. At recess
boys patrol the playground,
yank up
our skirts. They sing
Horst Wessel’s song
as they run by,
“Die Fahne hoch!”
Hertha Tielsch to Maria Radler,
Garßen bei Celle, Germany,
January 1, 1947.
I’ve enclosed
your handkerchief
which I am returning
to you, unfortunately
still with the stain.
I just laid it in the snow
one more time
to bleach—
Maybe that
will help.
Michael Fleming
To a Fighter
for Marti
Invocations
I. CAT Scan
And just what does the cat see
with his shining green eyes
as he skulks through the dark
warm jungle of your veins?
Let him pad silently back
to report that the wet, pulsing
miracle somehow continues.
II. Biopsy
May the surgeon
in her spotless apron
emerge smiling
from the kitchen
saying:
I had a little look
you’re not ready
the oven’s not
even hot.
III. PET Scan
It sounds so gentle—just a light caress,
nothing intrusive, nothing rude or rough,
just a feathery touch, a lover’s kiss,
a whisper barely there, barely enough
but enough all the same—you can’t say no.
Or a light knock on your door: open it.
A nice young man, clean as a Mormon, stands
there smiling brightly and asks: How many kittens?
Puppies? Tropical fish? And he hands
you a pamphlet, a rose—you can’t say no.
Think of these things when you’re in the machine:
the brush of a heron’s wing, the soft knock
of knuckles that have never known work, clean
sheets, clean slates, clean blood. And one day we’ll talk
of this and laugh, or cry—you can’t say no.
From Dartmouth-Hitchcock
I want to tell you:
they look like they know
what they’re doing here.
I want to tell you:
the man we met today,
he’ll be a sculptor in reverse—
a poet of perfect excision.
Just the one little pea, no more.
And then we’ll go back
to West West, to wood thrushes
and red-eyed vireos and the great
blue herons rising like pterodactyls
from ponds shaded by maples.
Maples—
they know how summer heals
those neatly bored tapholes
from early spring.
I want to tell you:
we wouldn’t have a damn
thing different.
Chemo
By now we know a thing or two about
fire, how it quickens everything alive
or dead or flickering between, and how
to conjure it from nothing, how to give
it what it needs, and no more—just enough
oxygen, just enough life. We love fire,
love to exult in our mastery, love
to amaze ourselves with borrowed power. By
rights we would be gods. But gods, they have their
troubles, too—all that incense, all that dark
insufferable mumbling, all that rain. Why
do we put up with it? We just do. Star-