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Suck Creek Scramble

He ties a rope
		around my waist
so I can step
				into a waterfall.
		Ferns, redbuds,
						and cuckoos
weave us in.
		I delete Tinder.
At Christmas,
				we drag boxes
		of golden glass balls
						from the closet.
I sleep next to him
		like a hog
when it finds
				cold mud,
		like I’m on a boat
						taking me slow
and straight
		to death,
like an anchor chain
				when it hits
		the bottom of
						the ocean floor.

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Getting Clean

The body is honest in bath-water. 		Belly button is communion cup.
Submarine ears open to 		the smear of piano downstairs—
the creaky opening of stove. 		I almost smell my mother’s kitchen
and run to ask her: 		Can I lie down in your tomatoes and corn?
She loved the praising 		her mother never gave. I loved it, too,
wanted to say to her, 		Let’s run to the mirror and see if we’re beautiful!
But I had to leave that house, 		tiptoe off the deck’s rotting steps
until the horse-grazed knoll 		broke me open over its knee.
I wouldn’t go far in the grass 		before I found her inside me,
and the men’s voices inside of us 		speaking words like:
Blessed are the pretty and quiet. 		The wind itself whispered it
amongst the manure. 		Tonight, she isn’t here. The bath water is cold
where I sit whole, dripping, 		and ask what comes this way
but the swallow of an unplugged drain, 		the shiver of standing straight up.

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Instead of Having Kids

I clog on a quarter-inch piece of plywood
at Slick’s fiddle circle on Wednesday nights.
Instead of suffering raw nipples,

I strap on swimming goggles and make soap,
stir lye into a steel pot and run outside
to shovel the valley’s air into my mouth.

In my Civic, I cross Roan Mountain
and describe the silver hill I chase to the teacher
across the hall. The silver is hoar frost, he says,

frozen fog clinging to trees. Instead of watching
the baby’s eyes shift from gray to blue,
we hike to the Walls of Jericho,

step inside a January creek, hide inside
a dead hollow tree and crawl under
a cemetery’s barbed wire.

My friends with babies sing more than ever.
I ask them how quiet the old self becomes—
the self before the child. My sister gets jealous

on Christmas Day when I zip my coat
and walk outside without children running after
to zip-up and carry. The rare sun out,

I only want the North Sea and Roker Pier.
Whichever path you don’t choose
gets lodged somewhere in your throat.

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Morning as Philosophy

This skinny hour—
		floor-boards damp with rain
	pressed down like piano keys.
I follow them to the sink,
		empty but for butter-knives.
	Bread gone but the heel.
How I’ve let things dwindle,
		let open door-ways whisper
	about the better future.
God could change my heart
		if I let him hunker down
	among the soft grip of summer
and point at that July path I took
		to the water dragging kayak.
	Water lapped the bank
and it was clear: stay here.
		Sun knew no better
	than shoulder, petal, leaf.
Turtles risked their balance for a branch.
		They did it in pairs.
	But on the lake’s edge,
I pushed off and dipped the oar,
		decided to be—majorette,
	toy working by battery towards coves—
shaded, sewn-in, minnows following after.

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In Praise of Multitudes

I am looking through the key-hole.
You are pacing past my only light.

When I say you are, you is more
than one. The English language

knows I am looking at a river,
a string of rail cars, a field

of what’s wild. When I say hold on,
the road will turn to gravel;

your muscles won’t soften.
When I say the bottle’s open;

go pour a glass, you slide
the bottoms of your feet

into the kitchen. My dusty floor
might stick to your feet when I say

let’s dance. When I say hush,
the crickets thicken.

Home isn’t where you leave it.
When I say you are, God knows

one isn’t enough: that hope gleans
heaven here and over there –

a girl gone to gather.

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Invasive Species

I can see myself peeling
potatoes in the window, the light
split by the frame in an x
across my brow, a speckled
robin’s egg, my face—we left
the Christmas wreath out
until Spring, and now a bird
has built a nest, Styrofoam
holly berries flank the twigs,
the thin beak of the baby.
How many times has our daughter
pounded through the door and upset
the balance of this world.
Suddenly the driveway
swamps, what were twigs
turn into hollowed out
ash trees, reaching up
like skeletal arms, chewed lifeless
by the emerald ash borer, serpentining
out, all green and jeweled. There
they are, and there is our little
baby, in the pond moss wetland
of the yard, all blonde amidst
the fallen limbs, the jagged lines
of timber. Sometimes she’ll
scare the mother bird out of the nest
with her shouts. She is
separated from us by a door,
by a moment, by a slant
of light and shadow, by life
and death. By god. We’re all just
waiting to crack open
or be emptied out, to be forced
from our homes or windows,
to destroy what we love
because we need it,
because we think
we’re safe.

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Housewife as Eve

A drop of blood pools on my finger,
blossoms like a tulip, bulbs and sets,
as the sun. I show it to you.
You prune a ficus benjamina,
weeping fig, it bleeds milky, too—
I say, you’ve never cared about self
or preservation. Every bit of sap
nettles your skin, irritates you, nags
and itches you like I do—the way I can’t
ever let things go. In the garden,
I push all the branches up,
out of reach. I can’t hear anything,
any whispers, eat this—come to it—
just this: A plant knows to sap
upon cutting. My name
means something like settling, like the end
of the day—evening. The sky,
sometimes, looks red and splotchy
like the back of your hand—come
rescue me, if there’s anyone there at all.
Separate me from the land, from man.
I want to lick the wet wound of the earth
until something heals in me
or it, until we stop wanting
to snip it all away.

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Domestic Pantoum

The bananas perch in the bowl,
severed as a woman’s hand.
I am undressing in the kitchen,
want you to touch me,

severed as a woman’s hand.
Divorce me, if you want to, I
want you to touch me
right here, in the kitchen lights—

Divorce me if you want, I
know what this looks like
right here, in the kitchen lights—
the knife handles glinting—just

know what this looks like,
it is an even slice, a piece, appealing,
the knife handles glinting—just
where we can see them. A corner, a sigh.

An even slice, a pealing,
unhinge you from your skin, your eyes
where we can see them, cornered, sigh—
How you appear florescent in this light.

Unhinge me from this skin, my eyes
want to see more open windows,
how you appear in this light,
to be alive and not want something,

want to see more open windows,
the vastness of this continual night
to be alive and not want something besides
these bananas, perched—this bowl: mine.

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Penelope Complex

What I do
when you’re clear
over there, over
me is tie myself
to the outside
of the house, naked
and pregnant, tie
myself to the drainpipe,
the clogged one—I want
to be seen doing something
unlike myself. Gender
is this burden in the hip, shooting
up the drainpipe, up
instead of into the earth—remember
I am a piece of moon. This is my
catabasis. Hunker down
or hold me against
the clean sheet
of the sky, legs out
like chem trails. I want
to divide myself
from the image you’ve written
in that book about mothers,
you know the one—I am
listening to the wind
for another voice
to call me out of my body,
a stone from the evening,
an eye for an eye—I am
undoing it all, as a tapestry, I am
not waiting
any longer.

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Licentious

When spring comes, I go naked to the lake
near the hospital where I was born. There
is my mother, she has brought me a dress
made from April sky. The clouds hang low,
dragonflies flit over the surface of the water,
cattails fat and meaty. She tells me come out,
someone might see me, the bounce
of my breasts, this ache. I will have to marry the snake
slivering into the banks, will have to marry the sun,
a thick hand on my shoulders. How much I resemble
my little mother even now, holding out fists of earth
to the morning. Give me a husband who’s never seen the glint
of my skin, how it looks like a knife, like a fine hide
to carry home to the children, to place by the fire.
Give me someone who will weave me a robe
from the grass behind my childhood home,
will sit me in the swing where my mother used to rock me
back and forth singing you have stolen my heart
now don’t go away. When I call out for him,
the possum hears me first, long-nosed, a jawful of teeth.
After I leave, in the middle of the night,
he comes to my bedside, favors the darkness
I’ve grown there, the way my sheets pitch up
into a cave, how I’ve always been bifurcated,
two halves of a girl, my want so pungent
it reminds him of his mother, how she’d play
dead in the road for the hawks,
pretend to not be so lovely, pouch full
of babies thick as disease.

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