It was nothing for her to turn out
two pies after church. Engraved,
her napkin holder implored Bless

O Lord. First came gravy and meat,
dandelion leaves dressed. In the lull
before dessert, my brothers and I

pushed back from the table—parting
Victorian shadows, exploring
attic nooks. We sifted through

photos, ran our fingers across
her typewriter’s cold metal,
watched each key throw its punch.

Her house struck us like a temple
to a distant age: cut glass jars
and standing clocks. When she called us

to the kitchen, we spooned up crusts
beneath a picture of The Last Supper.
Everything she did, she did in the name

of that man’s heart red as a wild July
strawberry. Finished, we slipped upstairs
again—children on the quest

for lost things, trespassing through dust
suspended in custard sunlight,
finding a soldier’s uniform hung

inside a closet as if, sleeved in wool,
our grandfather might any minute
climb back down from heaven.

Once every week, Larry drives to the nursing home
from his downtown beauty salon to paint

my grandmother’s fingernails red. Her eyes
are cloudy. He shakes the bottle. I see him

when I drop by to kiss her quiet cheek. The television
blares snowstorm news as Larry draws his brush

across her yellow ridges, by a window overlooking
fields shorn to the corn-quick, spare woods

where hawthorn each year sprouts its blood-berry,
white petals a flotilla of land-stars, floral storehouse

for cosmic remedy. Before plastic bottles of pills,
there was willow bark for fever, the sage hand

scavenging medicinal roots and leaves. And what
of the hand itself? Its love was present in the poultice.

Larry separates my grandmother’s fingers—
thinning feathers through which pale sky passes.

Her smile blooms blank against the backdrop of a hissing
oxygen machine. I watch from the door, the nurse

murmuring any day now. Larry gives my grandmother
an extra coat, and she lives three weeks more.

Some people stare,
searching for a Judas bone,
but all they can find
are the stems of your arms,
the sleek plunge of femur
into socket.

These are the usual things,
and why shouldn’t they be?
You were not a provision
of armistice or treaty.
You were not born to be
nation or diaspora.

The love that made you
was simple as the sounds
at breakfast: clink of pan
on stove, scraping-back of chair.

No slave ever rocked
inside the boat of your hips,
no explorer pried open
an African river.

They say the ancestors
reside in a sacred grove.
Your homeland is wherever
you stand. If the gaze lingers,
it’s on your spine, straighter
than the fence lines
at Gettysburg.

I meant no harm when I burned them
with a magnifying glass, wishing only to know
if it were true: you could channel sunlight.

Prometheus gave humans fire, and for this,
goes the story, he was tormented by an eagle.
The ants shriveled. My father was a doctor.

After he divorced my mother, I sat in the dirt
of his yard, squishing ants between glass slides,
slipping them beneath his microscope.

Families are strange creatures: whole one day,
broken the next. At my father’s desk,
I examined ant armor, pointy swords of their hairs,

too young to consider I caused them pain.
What have you learned? the elders might ask
in the afterlife. I picture everyone there:

elephant gods, the dog king. We are sitting
in a circle, on folding camp chairs like those
on summer sale at McGuckin’s Hardware.

When the ant queen turns her gaze on me,
I’ll apologize and explain how I’ve grown.
Through my father’s strong lens, I saw features

invisible to my naked eye. What, I later wondered,
could I not hear with my naked ears,
not feel with naked hands? I am certain now

everything is conscious. If you understand me,
I bet you’re the type who kisses your cat
good night. When your daughter calls you

to her room because a bee is trapped inside,
beating its head against her pane, I bet you
cover the bee with a Tupperware bowl and carry her

to the garden you keep meaning to weed, where habaneros
grow despite you. You shake the bee free
on a bed of mint, because you hear and do not hear her

say she is hungry, she is tired. She is buzzing
like something gone haywire. You understand—
you resemble her in this. You could be sisters.

When the doctor says he’ll need to remove
my ovaries, I consider performing a farewell ritual—
hippy shindig with altar, candle, and two stones
plucked from the river. Instead, I sign in for surgery
and awake to a stomach pocked with cuts,
skillful breaking and entering, ovaries gone
like two thieves stealing away in the night.
Nurses roll me into a recovery room. In morphine half-dreams
I recall the nude pantyhose my grandmother used
for Christmas stockings. They lined her hearth,
an eerie cabaret of thrombotic legs into which
my brothers and I thrust our hands each year,
tearing out what didn’t belong: gift boxes,
shiny lengths of ribbon, twenty-dollar bill pinned
to each toe like a callus. That night, I sleep
fitfully on spartan sheets, and in the morning,
a young orderly helps me from my cot to a wheelchair,
smiling—beautiful little boy—all the way to the lobby.
I can have no more children. I clutch my stomach
and grieve, remembering the doctor’s sketches—

how my tubes resembled horns, my uterus a skull
my brother once kicked over in a field. It was flocked
with lichen, lower jaw missing, as if the earth
had begun dismantling it bottom up, leaving the antelope
mouthing the ground like a bit, so accustomed
she’d once been to carrying life inside her.

When the dogwood in our yard drips
dry, pink blooms erupt like wounds. Knowing me,
my brother once said, be sure to live outside
of sadness. I craved storms the way some were
addicted to drugs or horses, I adored
the word flank for its military muscle.
On my left sits gloom, on my right
the memory of a Buddhist monk.
He was passing through town. I made
an appointment. About my daughter,
he said, she will do what you do. After that,
I sought silver linings without edges
sharpened, drank chamomile tea,
kept a journal until I turned coward.
Finding my daughter in the bathroom,
I calculate our odds and press a cloth
to her arm. She drops the blade in a corner
crammed with dirty laundry. I couldn’t speak
until now. No longer captive to her grief,
my daughter points to full moons and horses

clustered in a mountain field, hooves
carving columbine. She climbs the fence,
feet covering ground, planted on rock.
I think girl and hear thunder.