Poetry

Lighted room. Man and Woman enter talking.

—I mean, we built the world.

—What do you mean?

If we were to go
           if the house fell in an earthquake

if fire, if fire

& in the mornings sometimes awoke so cold
—the wind in Iowa City was brutal—
those days of doubt, those days of troubled land,
that I did not want to get out of bed &

In Iowa City, the restaurant 
where I worked on the weekend, 
I befriended another waitress, blond & blue-eyed, 

I was washing dishes in the sink. 
My hands were wet. The baby was crying. 

My mother, teaching me how to protect my body: 
“When a man touches you here, yell I am a body
that will bear a child.” How was I,
a child, to understand that as the sanctity
of my body. How was I to know to say, 
the body without that potential...

St. Stephen’s Day: home unsettled, 
a rupture, and here the ruched 
branch has turned itself outward,

its soft, bright innards held up 
along the path. At first, a golden

Women used to wean their babies
By painting their breasts black.
Hurricane clouds are black.
The Earth is weaning us.

Before I leave for good, I lift the pie server a final 
time, drop the receipt facedown next to the lemon 
blueberry slice, then my apron in the parking lot

On a narrow plinth in the corner 
of the gallery, a stone portrait:
a man, his mouth unlipped