before her child, the two of them

still the spitting image of each other: mirrors

to the last, broken and remade

in the same places. How could anyone

love me, her daughter once had asked,

if I’m not entirely myself? And though

she’d never believed love

could occur only in some specific

version of a body, now, struggling not

to despise her sickened flesh, to remember

some idea of herself that once felt

capable of desire, she thinks her child

was right. Every day, she pretends

to understand what is happening

to her body, what has happened

to her daughter, but there is no understanding

this. Each of them contains a separate

mesh and web of cells, connections

utterly unlike the other’s, something

she both mourns and is, oddly,

grateful for: their differences now

as palpable, as powerful as the chromosome

neither of them can fake. Years ago,

before they wheeled her daughter

into her first surgery, she tried to picture

which of her brothers her child

would emerge resembling, what kind of son

he’d be, what kind of mother

he would want, and how she could perform

that, over and over, to give her son the love

his real body craved. In all those years since,

had she ever succeeded? You’re mother

and father to me, her son tells her now,

joking on the phone, calling

to ask after her latest biopsy, which he hopes

once more will be benign. He calls every Friday

from the TV station where he works, proud

of his job, his new life, his large apartment

by the bay. He’s thoughtful,

she thinks; he smiles more easily.

He speaks in low, clipped tones that don’t sound

entirely like her daughter’s. Or don’t sound entirely

unlike them either. I’m fine, she lies

to assure him now. Everything’s the same.

Jamie, her son has named himself. After his mother’s

Scottish grandfather.

Horn of Plenty

Horn of Plenty

Would you do what this artist did? The one

who bought fresh goat’s blood to pour

over the cornucopia he sculpted in protest

of the war, its dark mouth large enough

for a yearling kid to sleep in, head tucked

between the glossy hooves: for in his mind

the animal was clean, the farm a bright,

mechanical place where anyone could buy

clear bags of meat and blood. But the farm

he found was poor, its owner’s health

failing, and so the artist, chagrined

perhaps by his ambitions, watched

as the farmer trudged into a muddy copse

with a pail to pull two thin animals into his barn.

Then he locked his knees around the smallest

one’s neck, its hips and triangular head

twisting in his grip, so he levered the blade

clumsily across the goat’s gullet, forced now to saw

through the tough neck muscles, the animal’s head

violently shaking no, no, no until the head