After the Test Said Yes

Stopped at the crossroad on 14th street, ice clean
as an apple slice under my wheels, I am waiting
for my turn and I don’t know yet about looking back 
which is why I cannot describe the color or make of what hit me,
moving too fast to brake on the black, and my blue Volkswagen
shoots out into oncoming lanes and once there begins to spin --
and that is where time slows, like they always say,
forming an opening in the day that was already thick with news.

The man comes to the car window,
wants to know if I’m okay, and I tell him I’m pregnant,
that I just found out this morning, and he looks like he will faint,
and I open the door and step out into the street,               

 and this, I believe, is the story of conception; how my daughter
used momentum and ice and velocity and impact
to pierce the atmosphere and enter the world.                    

First appeared in Barrow Street, Winter 2003

Reliquary

 Always I am taking the wounded from the mouth of the hungry,
the wet fur of the leveret from the jaws of the hound. 

Or I am the one with the sledgehammer, the poisoned steak
that I slip over the fence after every authority refused
to quarantine the beast. I have to protect my own, 

                            but the world assigns too many to me,
says they are each my own, the lobsters in the tank
at the market, the sparrows in the neighbor’s trap,
the massive tawniness at the edge of the field at dusk. 

                            I love the world that wants to eat me,
and I crave to devour it, too -- smear my face with butter and grease,
talk into the night about meals I’ve had. 

                            I am the paralyzed rescuer,
watching the nest mown over, waving from the porch
as the men head off with their long guns. If I have been sent here
for some task, I have blundered, I have failed.
I couldn’t find the trap door, the men with the proper authority. 

Yet I rest my feet in the stream and it washes me anyway,
and birds make nests of ribbons in my eaves. I am sorry. I was ill 
equipped. I can’t even tell you I will do better. 

                            But I will collect the bones, I will stand
at the roadside and say your names, Porcupine, Mule Deer, Wildcat.
I will take what lasts longest, the jaw bone set with jewels,
let it bleach in the white heat. 

                            I will say I knew you, that I found it by Salt Creek,
or in the Big Horns. I will show the architecture of your mouth
to children. I will let them run their fingertips, whorled with identity,
over the tops of your marvelous teeth.

Previously published in Eleventh Muse and Best New Poets 2007

TARANTULA FIRE

Winner of the 2010 Prism Review Poetry Prize

A boy far away experiments with paralysis,
using tiny doses of tarantula venom.

The sky won’t hold a kite today
so the man from over the hill

asks permission. He wants
to set his fields on fire.

Thousands of disguised beetles
line my windows.

They are never what I think they are.
He wants to stem the cedar,

and burn before the nests are made.
This is a small farmhouse

and the barn in the yard is decades dry.
The spider immobilizes her prey

and this is what draws the boy to her.
I don’t know what I’m agreeing to.

There are seeds waiting in the soil here
that can’t crack open without fire.

He tells me the large trees go unscathed.
Without my yes he cannot move.

He implies the neighbors to the south and east
are ready to burn. I am tired

of making decisions. The tarantula breathes
through book lungs made of thin sheets

of tissue folded into pages. My own breathing
has been ragged of late.

The deer and leverets will flee and return
when the ground cools.

I stand on my doorstep ready to say
light this valley, or don’t.

The tarantula’s blood is not true
blood, and her heart is a slender tube.

I light matches and shake them out
to smell the sulfur; only burning

keeps the understory at bay.
Frozen, I have to vote

for equilibrium. I’ll stand in the road
when the fire overtakes the hillside

and mark the woods emptying themselves.
The boy is moving into the future

on the venom. He will
make medicine out of fear.