Two
Poems
by Megan Burns |
Author's Links |
Goodnight, Our Childhood After the wreck, the night ended your father's arms around you clenched against the threat of morning. The telephone checked our silence and hands you held since kindergarten had no strength to still your shaking, all of us clinging to your house. The world had become a dangerous place our sleepovers transformed into a ritual of unrehearsed movements, battles against the unknown, the unbearable time between sun down and morning when we could ease into smiles over breakfast. When we were little girls your mother's favorite trick was to burst in just after dawn tooting an imaginary horn made out of a slightly closed fist lifted to her lips. She would laugh at our faces smeared with make-up from late nite beauty contests. We wanted to be women. From her funeral we carefully sorted and discarded plastic flower baskets laid them to rest beside trash bags bursting with the weight of empty beer cans, wasted cigarettes. Later that night we ate Chinese food with wooden chopstix to make you smile your mother's smile Amid the morning confusion of everyone returning to their lives I watched you, unseen from the doorway, finally turn and press your face against the white and blue afghan. Delicate Cutting one hand covers your face in the photograph the glare from the window captured beside you dissolves the solid lines of your grin and so you are not cheek or forehead, not eyebrow or lips, but pictures do this for us, catching the unspeakable often I cannot tell you but with words how we navigate the unbearable in the photograph the women's faces have been covered and their sexes exposed I wonder how we will recognize one another? I can make out the youngest among them, the curve of her hip, the thinness of her lips her body poised before womanhood like a trapeze artist who begins to waver then freezes it takes a delicate cutting to get enough of your face out to cover hers I've rearranged the terror for you because I know what you own owns you and so you too must be legs splayed pale as the moon, rudely exposed knees cocked to one side and feet covered in dust the womb if it could borrow your grin would and say there are some moments that are poetry before you get to them |
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