even though you hate goodbye.
You must leave then
before they cover up the body.
You must remember
it is just a body.
Spider
Smoke curls in the orange street light
as your hand crawls up my leg,
a thick-legged spider
with a dozen black eyes.
Evaluating
the broken veins on my thighs,
the soft swell of my stomach.
Deciding
if I am good enough
to pin and devour.
I am praying you won’t care,
about the acne scars and rolls of flesh.
Knowing that if you voice disgust,
I will push you off
with an outrage so pure,
its heat will pucker your skin.
I will wrap myself
in a blanket of contempt,
I will invoke the anger
of a thousand women,
deemed too ugly
to deserve decency.
Leave you on the porch
stung and unsatisfied,
while I stomp my way
up four iron flights,
the sound vibrating through my boots.
But as my door swings shut,
my fury will quietly dissipate,
until only slick shame remains,
like dregs
at the bottom of a glass.
So please,
don’t run your rough fingertips
over the missed patch of stubble on my knee.
Don’t sneer at the stretchmarks,
translucent lines that litter my whole body.
Please don’t.
Because I’ve been here before,
and I’ll be here again.
The Big Girl
It’s hard to say when I started noticing
how much space I filled.
It might have been a revelation
brought on by a collection of disgraceful moments.
Squeezing through the maze of a crowded restaurant,
pressed between chair backs,
blood rushing to my cheeks
as I knock a glass off a table.
Twisting out of clothes
beneath the hot lights of a dressing room,
trying to free myself,
like a trapped animal.
On the outskirts of a party
magnetized to the wall,
holding my arms tight against my body,
willing myself to shrink.
Being big
you’re both invisible and conspicuous,
your form calling attention
and then dismissing it.
They assess you
and then look away.
I lose pounds
and suddenly people don’t look away.
They look me right in the eye.
Suddenly people are a little kinder,
their smiles last a little longer.
They don’t believe I was that big.
Their mouths drop open,
putting on a show of shock and awe.
Wow, they say.
You look so good now!
It goes unsaid
that the big girl
would not have been their friend.
At first I don’t notice,
the shadow that follows me.
Its edges extend too widely,
threaten to swallow me whole.
The big girl follows me,
and sees all the people she will never talk to,
all the fun she will never have.
Guilt chokes me even as I laugh,
and pose for a photo.
The big girl pinches me,
stunned and betrayed.
The big girl was never in a picture,
pouting in a filtered selfie,
grinning in a group shot.
The big girl is behind me,
breathing down my neck.
She whispers,
Isn’t this what you wanted?
But I didn’t think it would feel like this.
Like the big girl in the corner locked eyes with me,
and I looked away.
Lisa Zou
How to Begin a Song
Begin with sight: the electric blanket of a sky in the seconds
before a storm. This time you leave the umbrella at home,
surrounded by the antiques your grandmother left; you learn to
knit scarves. The whole day through, just a sweet old song.
Begin with smell: the blood vapor of rusting metal. How you can
sense dust before it exists. The earthy aroma of old
bookstores; the essence of a child’s room. This time you’ll forget
to spray the perfume on your jacket, leave the door open.
Begin with sound: the sewing machine’s melodic hum,
the light switch in his apartment. The crackle of thunder,
spilling of apologies. This time you won’t listen. Georgia.
Begin with touch: the structure of the human body—the way
skin becomes a rainbow of pink, purple, green. How
your veins stretch like roads, bumpy and convex. The viscosity
of honey, the weight of wrapped vinyl records.
Begin with taste: the syrup of summer, the lemons you saved
for winter—now overripe! Oh, the bruised peaches—
how nothing worth keeping will last. The snow does not show
signs of melting and you knit. The road leads back to you.
Forget the distance between the missed and the mist.
This begins with you—my road has always led back to you.
Fission
You grow a beard, check the mirror,
notice you are forty years old, the next
morning, you shave it off, find you are
sixty. But life is like that, suddenly
everyone you know is dying and they
still visit you with your back turned to them.
One day, you took the school bus
and you earned a gold star for answering
the last question right. Now, the nurses
on night duty ask you something which
you can’t open your mouth and respond to.
All you know is that someone switched
off the light and you don’t know how.
Under the Parlor
Under the Q-switched laser, the dragon
blisters from skin to dough. The navy blue
having stayed with me for decades—
I got inked too young, too full of hell.
How the lines resemble
well trodden roads, now burned by the
side of banana peels and the newspapers.
How the therapist said I was a slave
to perfection, suggested I wear
my mistakes like a crown.
If
The boy took
the other road and
stopped by
the bookstore and
purchased a book—
of any cover. The man
he would have
become is now dead.
Blind Mammal(s)
Scientists in Honolulu have uncovered
a primeval tortoise long alleged as extinct.
The blessed creature stumbled out of my sink
in the company of toothpaste patches
and last Wednesday’s soap suds but
now this no-eyed sea residen
t with three fins
is on a trip to the lab in Maui, traveling on a boat
rather than below it. This morning, the newspaper
announced that he is not native; how many miles away
from his motherland we clearly cannot fathom.
Hazel Kight Witham
The Week Before
Tonight we shimmy galactic
under strung constellations
beside fertile citrus
the desert a kind of starship
flinging us far from all we know
our tiniest torments
all we’ve left behind:
the boy, three years old,
the one we longed for
over two long years of clockwork trying
and then,
~can I say it?
when the crush
of parenthood smothered all,
how we forever longed to escape him
for just
a breath,
a minute,
a small visit to the old life
we were so determined to leave.
This desert night we shimmy, sway, swing,
and I pretend
the globe of my belly
full of a surprise second baby
is meant for
dance after dance
songcall summoning me to my feet
again, again, one more
even as my lungs are broke with bursting
six months is still babymooning time,
six months is still second trimester,
all energy and fine,
so much time still left
you have to
shake it while you can.
My man and I,
the new life before us
a new world between us
slung dizzy with orbiting only each other
for this one night when we are
fearless and wild
manic and mischievous
summoning the teenagers we once were
those kids who never met
until out here, all night,
broke with bursting,
like there is nothing to lose.
Hoofbeat Heartbeat
These four days are crowded and lonely
nurses quiet chaperones to a new world
I am citizened into, restrained by
thick tape pinchpulled over IV needle
oxygen monitor jawsnap on my big toe
legcuffs inflating to remind blood to flow
blood pressure cuff sighbiting
on its own accord first every fifteen,
then thirty,
then sixty minutes
All feeding the story of me, of us
to monitors that remind me regularly
of how my body is failing us both—
my swimming boy and me
Belly circumscribed by the fetal monitor
forever slipping from the spot where
it can listen in on the loping gait
of my tiny boy’s frantic heart
I learn to adjust it myself before the
nurses rush in to find the song of him again
I learn to heave
my beached broodmare body alone
when his heartbeat slows
because if I don’t they will do it for me
fevered and fast,
turnover turnover turnover othersideothersideotherside!!
I want to listen
because I need to know he is here
and so the soundtrack of these four sudden days
is the bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum
of his fast foal heart,
and I close my eyes and listen to him
hooves pounding some beach
we will someday run
bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum
a promise, a presence, an I’m here, and I’m fine
sure and steady most of the time
those hoofbeat heartbeats
that doubletime mine
the only thing that offers
any kind of comfort
in the empty open night.
First Visit
My feet braced on silver flips
my legs covered by hospital issue cloth
my sore everywhere body
still leadened by that
miracle metal magnesium
because, they say,
for two days after birth the risks increase
We twist through the halls
and we buzz for entry
into a hushed place
where I first stop
and stoop at a sink
peel back a sterile soap sponge
little plastic scrubbers
made to make me clean
two minutes I brace
new-seamed, scar-tugging
hunched against the pull and pain of it
watching a clock tick down
the seconds until I’m done.
Clean, seated again,
they push me in to the open-air pod
four babies four-cornered in the space,
he is in the back corner
beside a big window
that offers a view
that should not soothe:
a building,
all twisting pipes and mammoth machine
spitting steam into the dark night
as here, all around me,
space-age monitors attend to
the story of too-tiny babies
in numbers and sounds
and then
there
he is
closed in his new womb
bathing under violet lights
they say his skin needs to adjust
eyes cloaked by gauze sunglasses
all of him so tiny
my body clenches at the sight
so skinny, swathed in only
a diaper the size of a dollar bill,
too big for this tiny life
and oh, the lines:
through his nose,
into his arm
patch monitors sticking to thinnest skin
ET O2 toe glowing red,
a tangle of modern medicine
so different from soft simple swaddle
he sends a shatter through me
all over again,
and when I am told I can touch him
I am electric with fear
but I open the latch
to the portholes
of his small ship
I talk to him
and hope it’s true about voice,
that they know it from always,
and I reach into the warm cocoon
scar-stretched across my
own aching skin
to touch
dark damp hair
wonder-soft over spongy skull
all of him still forming
my whole hand
cupping across
the small globe
of all he is
My other hand finds his wildly
precise feet, the biggest part of him
all one and a half inches,
toe tips tiny rosepearls
and I press, gentle and still
and so
here it is
our first embrace
my arms bracing against ovals
my head leaning against plastic
my heart trying to leave my body
to enter that small humid universe
where everything
suddenly
is.
how to become unraveled
cut your seroquels in half
those pills that quelled
sleeping beasts
but made you sleep
just too deep
when rising at 3 am
has become part of your day’s
unceasing song
and you thought you’d
give your broken self
a little
more pep
in the thinly threaded
night hours
when no one is up
but you
and the unquenchable thing
you strap yourself to
eight times each day
to make milk
to bring to the tiny baby
you only see
when you visit
the locked ward
for a clutch of hours each day
where he lays
every day
since he came
three months early
untangle the knots
and count the days
he’s been there
—53—
count the days
until he comes home
—no one knows—
count the ways
your life no longer
knows you
untie all of it
stack the to-dos
til they tower before you
and your stomach
twists new knots
and your body
won’t have sleep
it shakes you awake
to shake hands again
with that old
undoer anxiety
and you know
you know
you should probably
be under the care
of an expert in these things
before you go
halving your pills
but its all so tangled now
and you can’t imagine
how you’d unfurl the mess
to some expert
and it’s been so long
since you were in
your own locked ward
that you’ve earned the
title of expert now
but a baby—
especially one that comes
three months too early
and just in time
all one pound, ten ounces—
can do things
to unravel
the knots of a ladder
you so methodically tied
you are the expert now
and you aren’t sure
you’ll listen
to someone who
cannot hold all the threads
anyway
and besides,
you tried
you made an appointment
they just didn’t have one
for three months
three days after
his original due date
and So
you gather the threads
in those
fraying indigo hours
and braid them again
into something
that might hold
and hope
to hold on
until then.
Margaret Dawson
I See the Future in Your Mouth
There in the X-ray—your five-year old skull
a premonition of itself in the grave.
Behind each milk tooth the grown ones loom,