Elizabeth C. Garcia, Resurrected Body

Motherhood as Safety Coffin

for Emily Cook Dyches

No one told me love could be

a slow suffocation, a silence

not bird-flecked or tree-hushed,

but mute as tuber, a mothless dark

with nothing bright to howl at.

Here I bear every imaginable load,

loam the only revelation,

fossil only bone, the stories

only for the living.

There was no death test

that I recall—no tarsal-sawing,

no smoke blown enema,

no invisible-inked note

perched on my nose to read

You are really dead—I guess

because I never asked for one?

Have I yessed myself here,

(is this confessable?) believing

I am the bulb birther, the crocus coach?

I coax the tulip to unfurl like a plume and push.

Houdini, I heard, once clawed his way

through the chert, his body arrowed

upward, arriving like a winged onion,

like spring itself, panicked and gasping.

Is there any hunger for the young

other than being seen?

Could you string my fingers to a bell

to loosen its tongue, to lick the night

with ululation, would there be any keeper there

with ears to hear it?

Further details

LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Cancer Courts My Mother

Remembering Remission Christmas

They’d bickered over her like two suitors:
Vitality, her birthright, who had known
My mother well before her married life,
And Cancer, who’d mapped out his own terrain,
Unravelled secret strands of resistance,
Until oncologists chased him away.

Remission Christmas reunited us,
Our joy like steam escaping after frost.

I shipped my gifts to Florida ahead:
Biscotti, pignola cookies, torrone
From Little Italy, fine leather goods,
And for her green thumb, a red amaryllis.  

But Safety Harbor's Gulf of Mexico,
Producing Christmastime's Cancerian
Heat in December, had confused this bulb.

Amidst the presents and nativity,
Its empty cradle strewn with straw, green life
Ripped up gay mummy wrapping, and tore loose,
Unhampered by its ground like Lazarus
Unbound. My parents, unprepared for ghosts
Of miracles, became unnerved by sounds
Newborn right by their crèche, the fir tree's base,
Invisible and inexplicable
Like faith. Or like remission. After Mass,
They found a determined amaryllis, force
Which sleeps but cannot die, that mother took to heart.

Further details

Danielle McMahon, RowhouseSong

katydids

///

sister, i say

i think my heart must be a cobblestone fist, a bright red apple

i think my limbs are made of sycamore & sunflower stalk

i think my head must be a block of chambered concrete

like the kind along the back alley wall holding up the tall tomato plants

///

we pull the blanket of twilight over our heads & whisper out

into the open summer night, twine our chubby child fingers at our napes,

pointy elbows jutting like pinions

& when the night calls back it says more more more

gimme just one more

///

those kids on east end ave. are all out plucking fireflies

from the heavy night air & gutting them for their glow

streetlights buzz absent mindedly like parents saying tsk tsk

& somewhere down the alley we can hear that little redhaired boy

screeching his hungry heart out like a brown owl

& pots & pans collide in a tinny kitchen

even the giant luna moths bashing their heads

against our bedroom window are too dumb to know any better

they don't know that nothing

nothing ever lasts as long as it should

///

you know what i think

i think that this summer night is made for us two only

& the open window in our twilit bedroom, shared,

& the blue light & hazy stars

we don't even know what it means

to pine we don’t know any better

& only the stupid katydids would understand

what any of us are even talking about anyway

///

sister,

i think i can feel our pigeon hearts fluttering identical

like the torn wallpaper in the corner of the room

i think your elbow resting on mine is the strongest i've ever felt

i think our bodies must call out to each other like how the sister insects do

with twinning antennae twined in a forever pinky promise

& in the morning

we will have forgotten this night magic

our childish chitchat in sleepy spaces

& instead we’ll hunt for fat katydids in the tomato patch

& instead we’ll hop along like stray baby birds

with thestreet kids chirping more more more

Further details

Charles Rammelkamp, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge

The Experimental Farm

Grace and I toured the government-run farm.

A farm boy myself, I was curious.

Grace? Not so much.

But when she was taken to the henhouse,

saw just the one rooster

among all the hens and chicks,

she remarked about it to the farmer,

who boasted about his “prize” rooster,

able to “service” the whole henhouse.

“Just how many times a day does he copulate?”

she asked. The answer? Thirty-five to forty.

“Be sure to tell that to President Coolidge

when he passes this way,” she smiled.

Half an hour later my escorts and I

passed through the same henhouse.

The farmer passed on Grace’s message.

“Hmm, thirty to forty times a day?”

I mused. “Same hen?”

“Oh no,” the farmer assured me.

“He services them all.”

“Be sure to tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” I smiled.

Further details