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.