Coming Back to the Home I Made for the Woman I am Now
Here, I know the white dogwood
the redbud
the sleet-bright fences
fields tasseled in living gold.
I have driven down these fields
ones that look the same until you notice
they are not, the matted fur and bone crunch
of possum and deer, picked to their meat
by turkey buzzards, our school’s mascot.
See their flocks blackening the sky.
See them circle the hills beyond hills
a blood-dark spiral.
Everything here reminds me
of the way I wept into my palms
with a coat on my lap, the thigh-
clench chill of wrought-iron stairs
where I gave way after running through snow
purse-swinging
knife-breathing
from the town bar. I became all over again
a crumpled girl-thing in a world
of hairy wrists and loud-mouthed desires.
I let you count the hungry whites of my ribs
feel the aching push of my lungs
gather to a wailing bouquet
all the veins of my skinless body.
These days, you are the cobwebs
that crowd my path
the hound-dog ghost that drags
along my ankles in the mud.
One day I will kick you to the highway
and I will laugh
when you are struck, burst
and splattered
among the animal shit and scrabble weed
dirt for buzzards and criminals to clean.
Thrust of the road, I will run you down
over and over and over again
till you won’t look like you
till you won’t look like anything
but something that has been hated for so long.
And perhaps the day will come
when I have grown old and summoned
the curling softness hidden somewhere
inside of me, and perhaps then I will come back here
kneel beside you, and O—
I will gather the strength to touch you finally
till my fingers stain
forgive your clotted pieces rotting
into cigarette butts and dead tires in the mud.
But for now
this is the place where I will return.
I take my coffee, touch the fences and trees
lift my eyes to a sky spinning with turkey buzzards
dark and bald and beautiful.
They watch over me
as I drive down these old fields once more.
Today, they are bright
with the yellowing estrogen
of summer.
The Living
These days I go places just to say
I have gone. The train takes me from Prague
to Kutna Hora to a church made of human bones.
I press my forehead against the window and breathe
out a small fog. A girl pokes her tongue at me.
Her face is an imp’s. Her eyes are the color of a scab.
There’s the legend of a half-blind monk
gone mad who summoned the dead
from a dump of earth, unmarked by plague.
How he stacked their parts into a geometry.
How he created a chandelier out of every bone
in the human body save for the smallest ones
found deep within the inner ear.
This I had expected: ribs and femurs,
shoulders and knees, chalk-dry and decorated
into crosses, roof draping and family crests;
finger bones spelling scripture; skulls heaped
into corners behind metal bar. Again, I find myself alone.
I dreamt last night I awoke with an infection
that left me sterile. “You’ll just have to deal with it,”
my dream-mother told me then, huffing a sigh.
She, who in real life plotted her reproduction
like a spreadsheet, when she would meet my father,
have me. And in my dream I couldn’t stop screaming,
curling tighter, kicking things away. A worry
has burrowed deep within me like a bloodspot. I wish
I could reach out to a bone nailed to the wall, wish I could
cradle a skull in my palm. I miss that sober touch like an ache
at the back of my jaw. And yet, I see myself one day
in a place far from here. There I myself will baptize
a dark-haired baby the first day she is alive.
I will marvel at the artwork of her body. I will
blow my breath into the tiniest bones, the ones he left out
of the chandelier, bones of her inner ear,
the ones hidden even from God.
Meteor Shower
For a moment we believe:
Rush to the back deck,
Grip wood curling like soap,
And squint into the sky wedged
Between the sagging fronds
Of a browning banana tree.
I wear slippers knit by the girl
Before me, and your pajama pants
Slung loose at my hipbones.
The night is a sponge bath.
A pumpkin softens at our feet.
We hope to see meteors falling
The way I’ve hoped for snow,
Spring, autumn, even in places
That can’t hold these promises.
We peel back the night’s skin,
Strip clouds like fat from meat,
Seeking brightness, seeking it bald.
The oaks are green the color of velvet;
Spanish moss shimmers on branches
and wires, on us if we keep too still.
Only light the kitchen light.
Only sound the washing machine.
I breathe detergent and rotting orange rind.
I want to believe in us for longer than this—
Want to remember you smelling
Like rain on a night that never rained,
Your body earthed against white sheets,
Colored a dozen shades of brown.
Once we woke to an owl crying in the oak trees.
Once I woke to you kissing me I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
For a while all of our love was making up,
And when I held you, palms pressed
To ribs lips to chest your hands gathering
My hair like rosaries and your breath
Crashing into my eardrum, I swear
My teeth chattered and my skin
Trembled with enough hurt
To rock this body out to sea,
To explode across the Milky Way
And dizzy up the galaxy for good.
Then every night, you’ll have to seek me.
For you, I will break open
into a thousand fleets of light:
My body curved, a crescent moon,
And my heart purpled yet waking,
a wildflower named for the shooting star.
Anne Barngrover is currently teaching and working on her MFA in Creative Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, a city further south than the Deep South. She is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio.
