lifted off the dirt like the arcs of the

parhelions—and fit my small

narrow face as far as it would go

into the ardent dog satyr

visage of a Viola kitaibeliana,

and gaze, my short eyelashes brushing

the stamens and anthers. Although I was not

allowed to touch myself, maybe I

knew girls had a part—that part which,

even untouched, sang—descended

from a blossom. When I get my friend’s note,

the bloom at the center of my body tingles

and swells, it sparkles and slightly opens.

I’m a flower as my mother was a flower, and I was made

inside her, and grew on the stem we made

together, and left through her gates which opened

below my head. I love my cunt,

and want to honor its name, the coney

in it, the rabbit in it, the cover,

the burrow, and, because it came

from inside my mother, and came through its own

mother, I want to honor my mother’s

body, her lady country.

Genesis

When I was small, my mother was fun

to tell things to. She was seriously pretty,

she was anxious, and when her picture was taken

she held still

to be looked at, to be

admired, and judged. But when I was three,

and I told her, lisping, that I liked to hold

the satin binding of my blanket while I sucked

my thumb, she liked to hear that—thucked

my thumb—and her face softened from within.

I have her to thank that I like telling

things. The folder I found today

was made in 1917

of soft cardboard, lichen-embossed—

my mother was born during a world war,

like me. In the photo, she is scary pretty,

with a mouth of baby teeth, like a piglet

piranha, and her mother had spiraled the ends of her

hair into a tumble of curls,

to correct it. They corrupted my mother,

they saw her as a being more flesh

than spirit—and those eerie, sapphire

eyes—she was beautiful

like an object. I do not want to touch her,

even young as she is here,

but if I could appear to her mother right now,

then, in a guise like that of the man who

wrestled with Jacob, until the breaking

of the day—I would say to her, “Do not beat

your daughter, do not tie her up.”

And I would say, to my mother’s mother,

Hester, “Let me go, for the day

breaketh.” And Hester would then say,

“I will not let thee go, except

thou bless me.” So I blessed my mother’s

mother, and my mother, and they let me go.

My Mother’s Meat Grinder

Trying to believe in barometric

pressure, without recourse to mass

and gravity, I could picture it—

her bulbic tower, clamped to the breadboard which slid

out of a slot above a kitchen drawer—

her machine which ground mammalian muscle

for us to eat and prosper.

The grinder was made of stove iron, it had

a swivel top, an arm and a handle, and a