"In Sorrow Brought Forth"

 

Child, you are a mountain at my breast.
Your fist balls over my heart. You won’t latch.
I’m stitched up below, head a dimmed bulb,
drowsy in thick, mineral air.

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The nurses let me hold you but stand close by.
I can’t tell what they think
beyond their starched smiles.
But the sight of their white hands chills me.

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You grimace, deep in sleep’s double eye.
Your dreams balloon outward.
Watching you breathe, I think, God is also a fish.
No one knows what will become of you.

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Halfway between worlds, you stopped,
strangled in my net. They had to drag you
free of my body. Now, this thin membrane around you
is more shroud than skin.

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Your eyelids quiver, slice the dark iris in two.
The half-moons of your eyes gaze at something
over my shoulder. A god, perhaps,
pointless, incurable.

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You are already so old and the world you inhabit
too brief. Your body folds inward,
bending to pain’s gravity.
Your mouth opens.

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My moon-dense child, sleep-ridden and dumb,
there is no understanding you.
No ache is as deep as your mouth,
no night as dark as your cry.

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"A Childhood"

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feeling foreign in my own body.
Being taken for a boy
because of my short hair. Hiding my ruined arm

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behind my back when talking to others.
I imagined tongues like flickering lights
on my skin. I bit the soft flesh of a plum

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and all the purple spilled out.
I could hardly touch anything
without feeling it was alive. I worried

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about hurting one spoon’s feelings
if I used another. I didn’t understand
where words went after they were spoken.

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Or how someone cries and suddenly everything
breaks open. I didn’t cry as a child.
That doesn’t mean I was happy.

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Childhood sins are the hardest to shake.
I still blush remembering how
I made fun of my sister’s small breasts

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or how I stole two candles from church.
I’ll never forget the day I followed
a caterpillar on its way to build a cocoon,

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or how it looked after my one careless step,
one half of it spilled on the sidewalk,
the other still aiming toward flight.