horror vacui

I share in Mary’s concern about the Friday veggie meal at AWP. I’ll be at the Wick table from 12:30-2:45 with a voluptuous pile of pretzels and a $10 bottle of warming diet coke, which I will begrudgingly buy from the Starbucks kiosk, not because I want to, but because there is a line there and I’ll feel the need to get into it at some point. I think we should send someone out into the city to find something Lent friendly. I’ve heard Atlanta—well the south in general—is known for vegetarians and vegans. Or is that somewhere else?

A few of you have asked for an update on the manuscript and since I haven’t posted a poem in a long time, I thought I would post an old one and a new one that I’m turning in to workshop today. The first is taken from Thoreau’s advice, “In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or character of the day, as it affects our feelings.” The second is in response to both Mary’s and Maggie’s question: what does Abigail think about being pregnant? Hopefully I’m not just filling up space here. I'm very good at doing that.

Dust Storm, January, 1934

Leah tried to bring the peahens into the cellar. She could sense the storm from the way the cattle shuffled fence-to-fence trying for shelter under the balding trees. The dogs were showing teeth to stay in, but before Samuel latched the door, he tossed out the tiny birds. We can’t save everything, he said. We could hear their terrified peeping before the dust picked the sounds clean, and the hours after their silencing were the hardest to sit through. After the storm, Leah ran to the fields. The eyeless-feathered chicks were gone. For days, she put molasses on the tumbleweed so the near-dead calves would feed, and never stopped looking through the thistles and taproots for the birds, no matter how many carcasses of jackrabbits and field mice she had to kick through. When she did find them, their hidden bellies still unpicked by hawks, she brought them to the bucket of water I set out on the porch, washed the feathers brown clean, so they would come alive in another world, full of color.

Feeding

At first, Leah felt like a wing, brushing
the inside of my belly, and before I saw her
hand at the wall of my skin, as if to say hello,
I was sure I would give birth to a hummingbird.
Just a brush, just a wing, as if I might have imagined it,
the feeling simple as touching your tongue
to the inside of your cheek. That delicate, that small.

But he is not growing as he should, has not fluttered
his skin against the insides of my skin—
has been low in my belly for a month now, I think
hiding from the terrible air, or needing more of my legs
to hold him up. By the time we were over the mountains
he was all bones, elbows, knees, and my
back felt his pointy weight, turning and turning.

I don’t know if there will be a space for him to survive,
even in this endless prairie. I am not able to imagine him,
as I once imagined Leah, alive, feeding her evenings
at the edge of an indigo steam. Her cheeks soft as tulips,
her fine hair curling at the tips, muddy shoes, dress-scrap dolls.
Who will nurse him, if I can’t? How will he even breathe?
Who will show me how to clean out dust from his tiny eyes?

I am not able to imagine him, as I imagined her.
This is not a place where anything new is blooming.
My first child, who once spent the whole day tumbling
in leaves, painting the mountains at school, now ties
a rope around the waist of her torn dress, so she can find
her way back to our house if a duster blows
in, while she’s looking for dead birds she can wash and bury.