SHE GOT FED UP
she told Robert to kill them
but the foxes
were having too much fun
these chickens at Tractor Supply
were cheap and the anniversary
of that daughter’s murder happened
while on assignment in National Forest
Ina gave her a small bouquet
otherwise I wouldn't have known
Then I am one of a few people who can be reborn to populate the world; soon there will be thousands of Sarahs crowding the earth. I do not want this. I have Oyster with me and she keeps sliding backwards down this mountain of blood red soil. I keep hauling her up by the collar or pushing her from behind, but she keeps losing her feet. Heavy soled people are coming down the path. Oyster and I hide just out of sight under the path’s lip and a boulder’s fireworks in lichen. I can feel them on the path above. We are safe only in their choice not to look down.
DISEASE TAKES THE VOICE TOO
when he was sick on the phone
the nurse holding it
said he said my name
instead I had a vision
I’d been her daughter
in a past life’s long dress
small purple
flowers repeating
I’d tripped
on an innocent run on a rock
she’d lost
me too
Getting into my car, I drive for miles to look at this house – white, low-slung, stucco, and molded in skulls. I keep asking people to live with me, but I can’t seem to get a handle on how big the space is. Madeline kicks the door in to scream that someone named Tad is going to ‘just burst’ if I don’t let him go first. I find a path to the door, but instead I follow twenty fish until there is a profound creature – pitchy black and shiny under the moon. It must be at least four feet long, lying just outside the doors with a small black terrier asleep or dead next to it.
WHERE WE’D LIVED IT HAD LOOKED FLAT
of grass like a wave
the ocean is despite her calling
I’d travelled
we’d done this thing
neither of us always the mother
both of us always the child
then Dad built a string telephone
a long wire from the tree house
to the bird bath but Whitney
just yelled anyway
I really wanted to hold that baby
In labor for hours in a pastel hospital, I give birth to a child – bouncing and rosy. Everything is going along. The nurses teach me how to wrap her. It is like a battlefield – how you take a golf cart up from town to the hill where the people died, verdant below a rolling mansion. Harrison drives. There are these gray green sculptures of people contorted in vain escape, in rescue, or with faces of sadness, terror, and love. The nurses tell me to stop doing this because it is precipitous. I unwrap the baby one last time – the child is losing its skin. I show the nurses. They say everything is fine, that this is what a baby looks like.