Each X-ray Erases Me a Little More
Another X-ray
Any chance you might be pregnant? When was the last time you wanted to home against another girl’s throat and clavicle, your mouth taut and mutinous with pearls? What is the name for a girl who says she doesn’t feel attraction, who staves her belly with powerlines punctured with birds calling one minor key note over and over? Which arm would you like me to use to draw blood today? How long have you been a casket of steroid pills? Do you have a nice boyfriend? Do you use birth control? May I ask why not? Is ace one of those new things they’ve made up these days? What if you meet the right man and change your mind? Can you hold still so the technician can try again, please? Can you keep the cross -hairs of the beam centered on your gut, please? Are you sure the catheter hurts? Are you sure your gut pain isn’t just because you’re on your period right now? You see the red thread your piss like lead lining honey after the nearby cathedral burned? Do you know how divided a meteor feels, ligatured blue with flame up in the breathless cold of a million stars arriving after their deaths? What’s your secret to losing weight? How often have you found your stool dark lately? Do you see how your intestine is so obstructed it loops your heart? When you told your friend you were in hell, did you want her to come sing you out by holding your tiny wrist, empty as a halo? Do you know you’re in your prime childbearing years? What if your husband wants kids? Do you know when they cut you from your mother she briefly regained feeling and had to try to wake her tongue, like a cicada under snow? Do you know the sound a dozen hands make in the dark kneading a mother’s belly back into place after the C-section, of how your tongue is a scar that’s proof of the severing? How many times did your mother teach you to demand an epidural? How many times did she ask if you imagined kissing girls, did you imagine lips locking as two people eating matches and silence? Would you like your mother to draw you churched with morphine again? What has already begun to nurse your marrow, bladed with light? When you demanded everyone who love you leave the room and looked at the NG tube taped to your face, did you call your dilated pupil a mercury cradle, the hole carved in the shadow of god that falls across the virgin? Did you call it failure to tremble for the girl you love, or is that your name for your ventricles that have learned the art of letting go? When men running by you yell nice ass do they know the prismatic dark that hungers down the center of your eyes? The animal jaws you’ve faithed toward glass saying love like such a desperate woman falling through your bones?
Elegy for My Mother
I’m sorry, mother, to write you as if you were dead again. It’s only that I tried to imagine it— your body on a table for me to prepare your ashes in a jar for me to carry on my dashboard— and couldn’t. Instead, our hands stretched over the electric fence, the nervous mares pushing their muzzles into our palms. Instead, your mother’s gold watch stopped against your wrist, your hand guiding ice chips to her mouth. I’m sorry I’ve been such a hungry throat. I’m sorry for the C-section scar. Sorry to always be thinking of the coyote song you listen to when you walk back alone to your car at night, of when you wrapped the milk-mouthed kit in a grease-stained towel. I’m trying to say I want your arms always, I’m trying to say that I imagine arranging your hair, your breasts, your stretch-marked skin, and I thought of the vulture I saw on the clifftop swooping between me and a blue horizon. Maybe it’s how you cupped my hands around the dragonfly after we drowned it to try to keep the color—how you painted each faded blue spot back on, showing me that sometimes the only way we know how to keep something is to kill it so we don’t have to bear watching it vanish one breath at a time without us in daylight.
