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Baby stories
Beside the hanging skeleton of a horse,
there is a baby locked in the blue cupboard
at the back of my high school science room.
Stillborn at 23 weeks, he was a gift
to my teacher from his doctor-friend,
slipped into an old gallon milk jar
filled with formaldehyde.
At the beginning of every school year,
the baby is passed around the class, the students
turning and turning his cold glass womb,
white flakes shaken from the bottom,
whirling a snow scene around
his pale grey skin.
* * *
Seven months into her first pregnancy,
my grandmother's station wagon
skidded into a whiteout.
Pinned behind the steering wheel,
she hollered until a neighbour boy
helped her out of the ditch,
blood dripping down her stockings
onto the icy road.
Two days later, contractions
clamping her womb, she pushed out
her silent son, named him
Solomon, meaning peaceful
as a house of snow.
* * *
My cousin Jennifer tells me about the baby left
behind the hospital where she works.
Swathed in plastic and mewing
like a kitten, still slick with birth,
breathing purple around the mouth.
She tells me how still the baby lay
as she carried it into the nursery,
washed its cold body, how its wrinkled hands
and feet slowly uncurled in the bathwater,
blue buds softening with the warmth.
* * *
My mother's neighbour holds a funeral
for each miscarriage, marks a place in the garden
behind her house. She plants moon-daisies
for the girls, cornflowers for the boys,
presses their dried petals
into pictures for her walls.
* * *
Home at Christmas, the moon unfolding
into the snowflaked dark, I lie
on my parents' lawn feeling
the movement of this baby growing
inside me. I imagine my womb a cupboard
for these frantic kicks, the turning
and turning under my hands.
from Blessing the Bones into Light
Revelations, age eight
The number of the beast was enough
to scare anyone especially when Uncle Wayne preached
of European plans to tattoo the digit
666 on the forehead of every consumer
take the number and go to hell
or brave the tribulation as a true follower
starving in the end times wasteland
I pictured me my brother and mom
with bloated bellies stick arms and legs
drinking mouthfuls of snow
foraging for rosehips and tree bark
desperate for the rapture
with my equally devout relatives
hollow-eyed cousins gaunt aunts and uncles
and what would become of my father
who hadn't been to church in years
though he choked up Sundays at 4 p.m.
whenever Tommy Hunter sang the old hymns
those evenings he'd pull his harmonica
from the junk drawer
run his mouth over the hollow teeth
in a rusty version of Jesus Loves Me
his eternity my dilemma
knowing he couldn't go a day without his Export A's
knowing he'd believe the apocalypse a sham
would march on down to the bank or Co-op or village office
wherever a guy had to go to get that beastly mark
and me quietly grateful for his lack of faith
selling him out for a can of mushroom soup
a box of crackers
together our family at the kitchen table
straddling the fault line
between paradise and damnation
my father's feet in the fire
the rest of us already eating the banquet
from Head Full of Sun
Bundling
If I could climb back inside the Kansas landscape,
back into a buggy drawn by two horses
into a village of plain dresses and starched white bonnets,
dark trousers and wide-brimmed hats –
if I could climb back inside the life of a young Amish
girl, I would spend the night with you
in my ancestors’ attic bedroom.
Into long bundling sacks we’d slide,
a strong seam stitched between our bodies,
our faces flushed in lamplight.
We’d lie on a mattress stuffed with straw,
and every shift and move would call
a watchful parent to the bottom of the ladder,
ear listening for the threat
of unknotting threads.
If our hands were not bound to our sides,
I would salve your palms’ pitchfork blisters,
would fold down the stiff collar of your nightshirt,
move past your day in the fields, the barn, the raising
of haystacks and stooks of wheat to those other,
more secret stories.
Though we can whisper
through the dark without reprimand
and memorize each other’s faces
by shadow, the sense of touch
must remain in the cedar chest
at the foot of the bed, folded
away with embroidered linens,
crisp cotton sheets, a dark wedding dress
handed down from mother to daughter.
In a place where unbound desire is the snake
in the garden, we could be
simply a boy and a girl leaning into love
and all that’s imagined and hoped for,
the substance of things to come;
into that time when just to be this close
is enough, your body next to mine
like steel edging toward flint.
Any stranger passing by this farmhouse in the night
would see the attic’s glow and wonder
who lies awake so late behind that window,
who in the darkness left the lantern burning.
from The Sewing Room
Secrets
Every family has at least one.
For us, it was the ice cream
Dad scavenged from the town dump,
half-melted cartons chucked by the local dairy
when their freezers went on the fritz.
We stood over the slick rainbow of boxes
he stacked in our basement deep freeze,
an underground ice cream parlour opened
inside the bare concrete room,
a flavour for every day in July.
Don’t tell, Dad said. Not anyone.
That summer, black flies swarmed
the nights as always. Dad blazed
the wild acre for a new garden,
our tomcat went missing for a week
and came back with half his right ear.
Mum fell off a ladder washing windows,
broke both her wrists. These stories
we spoke freely over the building of tree forts,
backyard games of scrub and kick-the-can.
Hot days, we’d crank the lawn sprinkler high
and run with neighbourhood kids
through the flying swathe of rain.
Mum would haul the ice cream
from the dark basement, one carton at a time,
and spread them out on the picnic table
for us to choose. My brother and I shared looks
across our friends, kept our mouths shut,
while Mum, in slow motion,
scooped our dripping cones,
the white casts of her hands
holding out the secret
for everyone to taste.
from The Sewing Room
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