...I had a need, an animal need, to find
a place I had never been but which was
still, in some undeniable way, my home.
-Charlotte Wood
after Lorine Niedecker
Neoneurogenesis
​
Love!
me-e.
Love!
me-e.
​​​
Oh! They stop me in my tracks
quicken my wintered heart--
the liquid crystal notes
of a late March
Chickadee
letting
go.
​
​
​
Prenatal Visits
Papering the walls inside the first home
dozens of passages of Scripture
calligraphed by hand or painstakingly
hand-stitched, her whole trailer a trousseau
of embroidered belief: The Lord
is my shepherd, and I shall not want.
In the second home, blazing colors of Kahlo
among pastel-petaled portals of O’Keefe
and scrawled above the women’s kitchen
sink, Diderot: Man will never
be free until the last
king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest.
In the third home, my own,
originals in watercolor, oil, wood, stone,
choirs of Borges: Paradise will be a kind of library
and whispers of Szymborska:
The world is never ready for the birth of a child . . . .
Let him be happy from time to time
and leap . . . .
​
​
​
Intima: A journal of narrative medicine, Fall 2023
Swedish Death Cleaning
My mother calls before 8am:
be sure to take out my gold crowns when I die, they’re worth something!
Promise you’ll love my cat? All night
she pushes her precious face up to mine.
Take the computer any time, they just
keep changing it.
I no longer mind. I promise all she asks
though her little cat is pushing up
perennials in the back, where weeds
overtake her bank of heirloom flowers.
You are my gold! I reply every time.
You are worth more than anything!
​
And a lilting glittering laugh
spills from the purse of her mouth
like the opening of a bud
or the skip of a treasured child.
​
After Birth​
​
Spellbound on the kitchen floor
you watch me open the refrigerator door
and store what some call a tree of life
(having yielded its precious fruit) for my next
show-&-tell class of nursing students.
Loquacious after a night's labor, I tell you
placenta means flat cake in Latin,
is called mother cake in Sweden,
we make birthday cake in America
and the new mama, as mamas do in Nature
ate from it, called it delicious
(going to show: nothing is disposable).
You smile at the words mama and delicious
and I sweep you up in my milk-soaked layers
and feel our whole milk-swirled
galaxy (called galaktos in Greek)
smiling at a mother and child
having their cake and eating it.