for legs, as if the limbs had been snatched

from a fire while burning.

Her twig hands raked

her captor’s face. The young woman

could read no emotion on it,

however: the plank face

had been scraped clean; all the fear

and anger burned instead inside

their twisting bodies: she could see

the two there stuck at a point

of perfect hatred for each other: she

for his attack, he for her resistance,

perhaps the beauty he could not

stand in her, as her last date in college

had hissed, “You think

you’re so fucking pretty,” spitting it

into her face so that she’d had to turn

her cheek to wipe it, which was when

he’d grabbed her arm, pinning her—

Was this why her cousin had been chosen, to make

what she’d had no words for?

Persephone, the piece she stood

amazed before had been titled: the last,

perhaps unconscious gift of her grandmother.

“For your wedding,” she’d said

during her last week, pointing

to her own open palm in which

nothing rested. Perhaps

her grandmother had imagined

a gold ring there. Perhaps a string

of thick pink pearls. The young woman

drove home from the gallery, took a shower,

and did not tell anyone that day

what it was she’d seen. A month later,

in the mail, a package came

from her father: her grandmother’s Singer

sewing machine, its antique brass wheel

scrubbed of gold, the wooden handle

glossy with vines of mother-of-pearl.

It was lovely, and for a moment

she considered sewing a quilt with it,

onto which she might embroider

shooting stars in reds and saffron, the figure

of a child, perhaps, or of a man

by a house’s courtyard, his hat

in his hands, his broad body

naked, harmless.

How much thread would that take

to make? she wondered. And considered it

a long while before packing up

the machine again, sliding it back

into its wood crate and high up onto a shelf

of her bedroom closet. The place she kept

some books, old clothes, and college papers,

where she told herself it could wait.

Nightingale: A Gloss

Nightingale: A Gloss

Nay, then I’ll stop your mouth.

Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, II, iii

Language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it. Which is why after Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump writhing at her feet.

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