Previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Fall of 2008

 

 

At The Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities

It’s a miracle we survive at all,

I say, as we walk the cases,

wincing at a colon as big as a stove pipe,

scowling at ribs deformed

by corsets, and spines collapsed

into little broken heaps, the horns

and warts and tumors

jutting out of waxen faces,

carbuncles and gouty toes,

a lady whose fat has turned her into soap.

But my brother, being a man, jokes on.

He sees a petrified penis and gasps,

I’ll never look at beef jerky the same way again,

as I giggle and cringe.

Until a whole wall of bloodless

babies in jars breaks over us like a wave,

all stages of fetal development,

followed by the terrible web of maladies;

so many damaged dolls,

each one a lesson in fragility.

He points to the anencephalic ones,

saying they look like trolls,

but then a lonely floater

in its little sea of tears

sends him into silence,

for we could be at the grave

of the little ghost he’s been

tethered to for seventeen years:

his first girl, all tangled in her cord,

born still and cold as snow.

I can’t bring myself

to tell him about the tiny

pearl of a zygote my heart tows.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Fox Chase Review in 2009

First The Heart Goes 

Then the head.
The way it was  
with the ruffed grouse

you found in the backyard,

knocked out of the sky,

windfall for some night hawk.

And Nana too --

caught mid-flight

by too much loss and sorrow.

Of course, you bent to study it,
poor thing, filled, as you are, 
with reverence for beauty 
that never lets you 
close enough 
to see more than 
a quiver and blur.

Wasn’t she like that too --

quicksilver;  couldn’t sit still?

Overnight its chest came up empty,

hollow and dry as a cave;

the tribe that once lived there

fleeing, feathers left blowing.

Her heart, torn apart early on: 
a piece for each of her husbands,

the rest shredded the day your mother died.

How she wept, and asked God,
why hadn't he taken her first?

When they said she couldn't
drive any more, she told you she 

felt cavernous as an empty house.

And just one more day

for the body to abruptly

stop at the neck, mindless

as you were, lured by the long 
tail feathers, the golden ruffs,

bending over this bloodless thing

to pull them out. How easily 
the body lets them go.

In the tiny senior citizen’s 

apartment, she began to pace

and couldn’t stop crying,

burned her dinners,  forgot

how to take her pills.

Listen to you: making crow sounds,

as you spread desire’s shadow

across these relics of a 
radiance you yearn for.

Until you've taken
all you can, fetching
shovel and rake to

bring the leavings back

to the clean-up crew

in the woods.

So little left, by the time she died

in the nursing home. Just the scalloped

gold wedding band, that fits on

the end of your pinky,

and a little pile of pictures,

you keep in a drawer by your bed.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

Aunt Aggie Closes Her Eyes

and her soul slips away

like a bolt of dotted Swiss on the breeze

flying higher and higher

toward a Magellanic Cloud.

Good-bye, I say.

Hope you don’t mind

that I conjured up such flimsy stuff.

It’s just that you were gossamer

compared to our workman’s

poplin and kitchen oilcloth.

I see her circling the moon with my father,

Aunt Mary trailing behind them, and Uncle Joe.

She offers a wispy hand to my mother,

pours some tea and sympathy

like she always did,

then whirls, a dizzy mist

toward the grim

outline of her parents,

the thin familiar

arms of Uncle Allen.

 I wave. Thanks, I shout,

especially for your knock-knock jokes,

and for not taking sides when things fell apart.

For serving us your too small Sunday roasts,

so we had to stop for burgers

on the way home, my parents joking

and laughing instead of fighting.

You never added salt to anything.

You gave me my first Pop Tart,

and taught me how to face death

with a heart so full of love

there’s no room left for fear.

I’ll  always remember.

She giggles and shakes her head,

then flies off to ride the Milky Way,

glad to be as passé as Christmas tinsel.

Thus the heavy basket

I’ve carried all my life

becomes a little bit lighter.