The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

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Ars Poetica

               1989

I tell you this: the night before I was born my mother sent my waning father and two brothers down the street, elms pressing open the brick sidewalks from below, to the capitol building to watch the fireworks. Peace for my mother, and her big bellyful of me. But lights busted through the running-glass windows of our home and something in my mother—was it me, hankering to bang back?—kicked up a longing for explosion. The television made such big sounds small. Our home seemed to spire up to stars that burned in the city sky, me in the way of my mother’s swollen feet as she walked up the stairs to a fire escape slinging out of a third floor window. She stepped out, sweating July iron. The ringing bars grazed her belly as she pulled us up to the gravel roof where my shuffling feet kicked over themselves. Lightbursts made my mother’s face glow not just with copper, beryllium, lampblack, but now with questions, the baby ignited, bringing something hard as rock salt to a house about to explode.

               1993

And then: when I was a child I swam with dolphins in an ocean that fanned itself across the horizon like a woman’s hair spread over a pillow. I have to tell you now that this is not true, though I have seen dolphins, slipping and rolling through distant green waters. The wind pulled dune grass up from its roots. A fish threw itself onto the sand and we rubbed its scales off, offered them as a talisman to the sea, burned the body over the fire and ate until our bellies were as full as the moon’s. Perhaps this is not true either, but it could have been. What I mean to say is that it happened just as the moon dipped behind the dunes, or didn’t, but I do remember the moon.

               1996

This is how it happened: my father stood in the kitchen at midnight. I did not see him until I opened the fridge and light spilled out, sliding over counters, illuminating his hush as he sent me back to bed. I told no one because maybe it wasn’t true, although I wondered who he might have been meeting there in that ocean of strange, beating night. What I mean is that some memories turn tirelessly with the moon, some memories will not drown. When I ran from the waves in my small dreams I did not stop to study the pattern of the sand. Or, if I did, perhaps I only found the imprint of a hundred empty kitchens, handing their transgressions to the night.

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