WINDOW INSTALLATION
Every new house needs a window. Every window a cornfield. Every cornfield needs a boy against which to compare height. Every boy needs a staple gun. Every womb the chance of striking the record. Against the row of small windows above the sill, my husband and I leaned album sleeves to block the light. Mozart, Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre. Cases we forgot to empty until the sun bent them into dizzying melodies that twisted into twilight on the day we realized what we’d done. We watched the sun go down, watched the birds as if it was a virtue. My daughter was experimenting with fear, testing shadows for firmness, so I tried to watch them the way she does and remembered no one was coming for me. I admit I’ve been lonely. I hate the word menopause the way some people hate moist. They say the big M is having a cultural moment. Maybe by the time I get there it will make good on what was promised. Maybe by then we will have taught roses to grow without thorns as if we didn’t just launch a rocket that carved a hole in the sky. The mothers will bed down in fields of them and listen to podcasts about birds and skip the ads for Zoloft and trace the shadows of each petal, trace the passage of light to the burning.
BATHSHEBA AT CHRISTMASTIME
Bathsheba doesn’t have much to say about growing things. End Times always arrives before Advent, so she mixes the two—sheep, goats. Her man was a shepherd before he was a king, the way her son was alive before he was dead. Now, she plays a broken tambourine and cuts salt dough into snowflakes for the tree. No angel’s ever come to visit her, but she’s fine. She’s in her turmeric era. She has beet dye for her cookies. She’ll live forever. She has a spruce tree, and all of last year’s cranberries that caved in on themselves like slow, imploding planets. She saved them, as she saved all of you. Since none of this is real anyway, picture now her firstborn as if he’s grown and tightening the screws of her kitchen table. He is a carpenter too. He made the sun and moon with paper mâché. Someone once told her you must not like surprises. She just doesn’t like to be tricked. If it’s a dream, for example, she feels she ought to know. What child would you trade for a psalm? She’s so blessed, so ashamed. All of her sons are back from the dead, yet here she’s stuck on an endless loop, skipping the YouTube ads and drying orange slices and pressing salt and flour into the shapes of men to hang on the tree.
Advent Calendar with Natural Dye
With a line from Diane Seuss
I soaked the cotton and sewed it into pockets to pin to twine, tucked in touchstones to take us toward shorter nights. Oh give thanks for the mineral kingdom, for mordants that bond color to fibers of fabric. For weld hiding a wooden bird. For eucalyptus holding Three Kings soap from a small business in Wisconsin. And hopi: local Honey Agate. Feld: stars. Black walnut: your name, reverse cross-stitched on a stocking so you’ll remember what I can make. Cochineal: the painted fox with removable tail we bought you in Mexico City. Marigold: summer cyanotypes preserving old wind. Turmeric: I looked up into the dark for something to bloom by. Madder: girls can do hard things. Cosmos: my uncle drove my cousins and me to our great uncle’s house to sing “Silent Night” in German on Christmas Eve when I was in college. He brought his trumpet, and we arranged ourselves into a respectable three-part harmony, and afterwards we got cookies, and that’s the great uncle who died last year of an unexpected stroke. Maya blue: an orange. Purple basil: street lights on the underside of a thousand nodules. Olive leaf: the Fibonacci sequence. Ochre: as a child I loved this book about a boy isolated in a forest with enviable survival skills, whose mother abandoned him, just walked out the door, but when he grew up he discovered she’d been a magician all along pursuing her important magician career, and his own destiny was to climb stairs into the sky to save her. Logwood: pencil sharpener. Indigo: the apron I salvaged from the box of grandmother’s old things after she died, reverse cross-stitched blooms stained brown with coffee or blood the way any bluestar turns at the end. Cinnamon: salt dough you threaded with pink ribbon. Sunflower: my voice, returning. Wine: folic acid. Carrot: my college choir director told us to “sausage” when he wanted us to shape a long note—to begin softly, to swell, then ease (the shape of everything—the three-act structure, the bridge, youth, copulation, volta). Black bean: a mother invented the first advent calendar for her son. Of course her son monetized it. Of course his mother sewed her gifts shut. Of course her son used doors. Lavender: benign. Blackberry leaves: they’re everywhere this year—the calendars I mean, in this economy. They’re magical, a way of gifting time, a method of slowing down, content for your story, commissions, all those samples for women with purchasing power who may buy full-sized in the new year. Foundation. Serums. Avocado: hope, the sort only an exterminator can kindle. Onion peel: the itch where the biopsy needle went in, the open tear duct, the coloring sheet of the nativity covered in stickers printed with my dead grandmother’s return address.
The ScavengeR
I told myself I wouldn’t be a poet who writes about birds or sunsets. How hard could it be? Everyone has seen a sunset. No one has seen God. When Jesus stood before the sunset, he thought about dying. When I stood before the sunset, the dead grass at my feet seemed less ridiculous than the electricity poles across the water. Clouds were suspended like rough yellow fibers, strips that composed the horizon and, differently, the ice, and, differently, the waves. Anne Bradstreet said she’d worship nature if she didn’t know better. She, the blue wishing she were yellow. I too am attempting worship. The fact that I’ve made life still doesn’t make me feel anything, I suppose because it didn’t feel like I was doing anything. I was in pain, mostly. The sunset would strike me differently if I were in pain. I’d be less flippant. In the brief years I imagined myself an intellectual, I dabbled in Wittgenstein and poststructuralism and still believed God had chosen language as the tool to save us—I drank from both cups. Language was fruitful and fruitless simultaneously. Sometimes I wonder how Jesus acquired creativity and critical thinking. How does a toddler manage exploration without ruin, when does creation become ruin become sin, wonder how other poets manage to write about God, manage earnestness. My confirmation verse was the one about God working all things for good—I was in puberty, which makes sense—but the verse that has seen me into my childbearing years is the one the man says over his dying son—Lord I believe, help me overcome my unbelief. And I want to be saved. When I took all the baby clothes out of storage they were ruined all that spat up milk staining the fibers yellow no hope all of it ended up in the trash though the internet told me to try a bathtub of Oxyclean I thought I could write about God about substance and God beauty. I wanted to write a poem to end with Solo Deo Gloria the way my theatre professor ended all his emails, but nothing I say feels beautiful or pure enough and why would you ever hold a mirror to a sunset?
So Much For Maternal Instinct, With a Line from NPR Paraphrasing Leta Hollingworth
Look, I am not gentle. Look, the boy at the lake threw away the sandbag propping up the sign Warning Thin Ice Stay Off Lake while I was looking, wrestled it up and let it go it over the lip of the trash can, then lifted his arms in an aggressive shrug, like he wanted to fight, or scare me. He was probably ten, to be clear. I was with my two toddlers. What, he yelled to me across the sand pit of spring animals, and I said nothing. What, he said. My face was a stone. I pushed my children on the swings. On the way home, we passed a pair of crutches propping up a tree in someone’s yard. Beside it, a piece of driftwood worn into a huge pencil or javelin was planted in the dirt like a trunk and encircled with rocks, a gesture which, I learned from our local Lawns to Legumes Program, signals to your neighbors your intentions. Look, even I know a lost cause when I see one. Careful. When you look, then you’ll have to pay us.
A Small Price to Pay, or The Momfluencer’s Daughter Breaks her Silence
I’ve followed you my whole life. Mother, some call it beautiful. But I saw how you declined to reach down and feel for me, too inside your own pain. I watched how your eyes were closed the whole time to what thousands of strangers have seen, my blue beginning.
Do you wonder what it all might have been like had we not wanted knowledge, or fruit, had we not wanted want? Imagine if I’d been born in a garden with the jays and jaguars gathered to greet me. Imagine reaching for me—I, your worker bee, I, a girl in a species they say is headed for extinction.
Your choosing me was a business decision after all. An investment in your future and followers who, watching me emerge, couldn’t doubt you meant business. Couldn’t doubt you were the real, raw deal.
Mother, you said creating me was mindless. Your expertise was in content (not to be confused with contentment). You said creation should be creative. I won’t start with generations/generative. No one wants to be here all day.
Policy-makers ask: if PTO won’t make me want to be a mother, what will? A yard, to start. A place to send children forth into mud and buds and beets and branches and I need do nothing but sit with my guiltless thoughts. You think I’m kidding. I’m not asking for the moon, just a garden. Or, I guess, better urban planning. Not a car in sight. Nothing to forbid.
Mother, there were never any children in the garden. Mother, the first sons killed each other over jealousy. The first daughters aren’t even mentioned. Mother, I’ve watched the recording you posted of my birth again and again but it doesn’t feel like an origin story so much as a bid. I wonder if we entered into a contract, you and I. I wonder if I have any right to be sad. Stones don’t mind being shared. Birds don’t mind being watched (I am a bird).
Mother, angels guard the entrance. Mother, I am blue. Mother, I might have been anyone, and still strangers had me memorized before you opened your eyes to name me.
The Momfluencer Goes to a Funeral
It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so they’re testing the sirens, and this is harder to explain than anything else. Someone’s left a cardboard box of corn on the front step, so we shuck it and let the children play with the silk. It tangles in hair, scatters on the wind among shreds of Kleenex I pluck from my purse, shreds I stored there after letting my baby tear them up in the pew while my inner voice offered affirmation because texture and cause and effect. It’s the end of summer. I nudge withered noses off the ends of freshly shucked corn that is no longer sweet. My sister finds the can of Wild Harvest organic canola oil spray in my cupboard. I don’t use this, she says. Butter or bacon fat. I save jam jars to use as drinking glasses. Yes, that’s a trendy thing to do. Oh, she responds, is it? My daughter’s lines are sharp, thin ridges on the opposite side of the obituary. She’s left a mountain range. A pattern of stars. A road. I run my fingers over them to convince myself they’re real—the stars, that is, the road. Grief is the turnip my mother harvests from her garden and brings peeled in a Ziploc in case anyone wants to try it. It is dull white, and the bag is full of condensation, and two days later, I throw it in the trash with hamburger buns ridden with preservatives and an ice cream bucket of turkey and fat. Today, I am overripe corn, stripped and withered along one side. Yesterday, I was a peach. Let heaven be the place I become the hard pit I’ve lately lost. Tomorrow, I will be the apple my daughter painted on her first day of preschool to learn the number one. I don’t know what the paint is made of, and I don’t need to save that either, do I? Every day, if I ask her to, she can bring home another one. Someday she’ll paint what’s inside. She’ll try her hand at seeds. But I can’t save everything.
THE BIRD TEST THEORY
We’ve lost words because of the things we don’t measure anymore. Look, a house can be warm all winter on a cord of wood if one merely considers where to plant the fire, how to arrange steps, ceilings, how to move air. Look, at my backyard full of trees I keep meaning to prune before they become trouble—tall enough to bother a foundation, produce a cord, heat a home. It’s almost Halloween. I’m considering going as yellow. As salt. Look! With a white umbrella. I consider sugar and posting something ponderous like loving your loved ones, with a dreamy dying prairie backdrop. The other day I went to a 50-year-old’s birthday party, where all the women agreed their 30s were the worst. What’s the word for the cup that measures me, that everyone tells me to fill? Look, I just need to know if you love me. Or whatever. Love won’t keep me warm like a burning cord can as I look at all those Emilys and Johns above us, all those silly salt stars sold by whom and for what.
Poem for October
We’re very good at killing things, I think as I drive past the neighbor’s on a day they’ve dumped a deer from the trunk bed onto the driveway, its legs bent under it. We’ll forget our age if nothing around us ages. We’ll forget everything but what it is to have nothing hurt. We’re burning all the wood. We’ve stopped bringing our children to the temples. We’re careful. We keep them upright. They have never tasted oak leaves that flake into the last days of October. They can’t imagine ghosts. They must ask to taste sap dripping from the veins of a tree struggling to be warm, must ask what a spirit is. Sometimes we kill the children too. Or maybe they’re lost. Thankfully, our memories are short. We’ve never walked wood worn down by centuries of feet, and frankly it’s impossible to say what’s true anymore. We burned all the pictures, burned the children too, and who could blame us if we didn’t check the news while it was happening? We were in the garden, tending the squash vines. Who can hold every pain in every place in the world in real time, after all? The children disappeared, that’s all, the way any coneflower loses its petals in autumn. Life finds a way, and we love sad songs. Love a good cause. Love coming through on the other side. Love to honor our scars and marvel at our resilience, our blood like any tree’s blood, rushing at winter’s retreat, keeping us upright while snow still hides the seeds and the mothers and the rot.
Acrophobia
Because, when her grandmother fell when reaching for a red fire truck, my three-year-old daughter shook. Because, for days, at unpredictable moments, she’d say Grandma fell. Because, each time, I’d say, And then what? until the memory flowered and rooted. Because I wanted her to reach further, to the paramedics who let her sit in the truck. To their kill-time smiles, to the homecoming. Because I want her to believe in reaching. Because memory is the housefly that dies dusty still climbing the muntin, a magician that resurrects with a hiss during spring cleaning. Because we are made of memory and each act of memory changes the memory. Because I am always after control. Because there is so little I can control. Because I seek to preserve something unchanged, but if I can’t do that, something that reaches. Because I have become reached for, my daughter’s brown arm wrapping my shoulders. Because I never knew much about gardening, except that the rhubarb returned every year without our asking, with the mint and the shoots of green onions and purple-headed chives, and that we begged from three peach trees for years until my father uprooted them, and my mother gave up on tomatoes when we couldn’t keep the deer away after all the cracking ice cream pails of water faithfully tipped into the sandy soil. Each spring we raked the year’s egg shells and banana peels in. The pine cast too much shade. I teach my daughter to root. Because when I smell mint, I misstep and reach for something to steady me.
