Originally published in Dunes Review, Fall 2017

In a Parking Lot in New Jersey

I give my mother a small piece of news: 

I can’t methylate folic acid. Not at all. 

The words feel good in my mouth. 

I don’t know why. Methylate. She loves me.

She sits into the cold leather like a bird

fluffing down in a nest. “You know,” she says,

“Folic acid is important for babies.” I know.

I can take pills for this. My body will

right itself, grateful for the gift, and someday 

I will produce another good body from my own. 

I fall asleep in the car, as I always do, rocked 

by highways in a chair tipped back, my abdomen 

rested in my laced fingers. And yet something

floats planetary: a tangled wig, 

a skein of yarn, a poached pear,

a mirage. In some way I have been waiting 

for this news, have read so many 

mothers dreaming up monsters 

in the pits of their bellies that 

perhaps it was inevitable, perhaps 

I had known and by knowing made so 

that this always was my body’s natural 

pilgrimage, the undammed course 

of the river. And I can feel it, just on the edge

of dreaming, in that place of bad logic

one comes back from with a start—

the love felt for the tangled wig, 

skein of yarn, poached pear. Not for 

what it could have been, but for 

the real sullied mess of itself, never truly alive, 

only rotating wicked-limbed and unknowable 

in some redness vast as space, 

far from my body as the moon. 

I love you. You are me. We can be 

sullied together. Listen to this, "We can be,“

hope shared with a knotted thing 

that never was, like an invitation

to pick strawberries. A cracked 

spine and a maze of a heart, the 

wild twisting of a silhouette. 

It shifts me in my sleep. 

You wreckage, crashed ship, 

what shore were you meant for? 

I wrap my arms around you 

to quiet the beating of your 

many skins. I am here as 

you are here. I am sorry 

to leave your small life behind.