their tableau, she told us. And drifted off. And

we did not know the meaning behind this.

The wolves must have looked so comfortable

to her: wordless and in this wordlessness

perfect. Did she want to go there, too.

I could point to the image and say, my father

must be in there, my uncle. Or, the wolf

is you, you are still the mother,

as if necessary to name that self

at the end of its world. An animal cry,

memory. That was our selfishness.

As death was hers. She insisted upon it.

And why not. It was good for me

to get a chance to know you,

she said, who had known me

my entire life. Then the pills, a small

handful, crushed into juice.

She was happy then. We all were. Or

said we were. What

is the difference now.

Tiresias

Tiresias

She knew, before her daughter did,

that they would need a different body.

And so she saved up for the surgeries,

as soon as her daughter began to cup

her urine in a plastic funnel to pee

the way she’d seen her father do,

before he died. As soon as she’d begun

to pluck her lashes out at school, as soon

as she’d had to buy a dress suit

from the boys’ store to placate her daughter

into attending a family wedding. It wasn’t coyness

that had made her daughter want to hide

the breasts that swelled, causing the girl

at night to cry. And if she herself cried

to find locks of her daughter’s shorn

brown hair curled under the bathroom sink,

she excused these tears by saying,

I’m only sorry you never asked

for help, to hide the fact it was

not lack of usefulness but loss

which daily terrified her. She looks

like you, friends said to compliment

their closeness, and over the years

she wondered at those similarities:

the strong jaw and slim hips inherited

from her own father; her full breasts thin now,

slack from the weight she’d lost (Stress,

her therapist had warned her), aware

of the looks the two of them generated

in the grocery store, at the movie theater.

Boy or girl, her child would always be

attractive, she knew, relieved to think at least

he’d be, in that strange way of beauty,

anonymous. Though anonymity was never

what her daughter wanted. It is not

what she wants, either, pulling back

the sagging lids of her eyes, imagining

the breast lift, tummy tuck: she could

have gotten them all, lying next to her daughter

in matching hospital gowns, both of them

working to unearth something beautiful

from this flesh that, daily, betrayed them.

And now, after her diagnosis, she wonders

why she never asked. To remove

the breasts entirely, cut out the slick

dark bag of womb, stitch out from fat

and labia some length of skin

she’d learn to call a penis—

She imagines standing, naked,