25 - You Only Get What You Give

Girl knew she would have troubles.

The church handed her womanhood

on a silver platter. They said:

“Make sure everyone is served.”

9 - Christmas Casket

You built a box for the birth of salvation.

It was cedarwood, stained.

Nestled underneath a Yuletide spruce, the hope

chest crouched like some anthropic bud

off the conifer’s dying body,

trampling its skirt with

blockish feet.

It was ugly, misaligned, and guilting:

The lid was crowned in twisted,

viney wire, applied with spikes

driven down in woodflesh,

and opened, you could see

the tips protrude inside,

reminders, maybe, of your

hard toil.

You would always remind

us of your

hard toil.

Resin-scent would henceforth be

everpresent at my bedfoot,

cloaking me in the aromatic

afterlife of trees

and filling my throat

with presence,

an admonition that my future

was your gift.

I was meant to make my dowry in it,

Assembling the sundry lot of

coupled life:

towels, cookery, bedthings.

But I filled it with

cheap, broken junk.

7 - Pine and Porcelain

Remember my satisfaction

in knick-knack shelving: pine

riddled with phloem, xylem lines

cheerily cohering in supportive

chorus that yes,

finespun gewgaws shall be upheld in this place!

Yes!

(Lacking power,

I had twisted screws through drywall

to sturdy the board by all

the torque my own right shoulder had.

As if this deed would compensate for

fragility elsewhere.)

The artifacts were inane.

A matte black Bastet cat with

inexact gold embellishments,

bought for twelve dollars out of the

import store cat pack,

and also hollow;

a white plate, glazed

to seal in a fingerpaint print

of a child’s pawlike foot;

two identical porcelain dolls

from a forgetful giver,

both named after me.

They all stood in a vague line

saying nothing decisive.

The dust now crowds

around the absence of their bases,

chalk lines,

anxious tracings of a murder scene.

Well, they were cheap.

Convincing, I professed my loyalty to the pine—

a venerable tree, bent to an unfit purpose—

But oh, did my skin prickle with

a sympathy for that porcelain.

5 - A Kind of Treason

Level-headed.

In that home, poise was a virtue honed through

a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:

The gravitas of classics and

weight of histories were transmuted

farcically into literal gravity,

to calibrate a muscular keenness for

interpreting imbalance,

adjusting response.

Columnar girls,

holding up virgin

tomes, with the straightest spines.

Yes, it was still like that recently.

Who knew this prim tutorial in

feminine comportment—

to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear

their uncracked, funereal lives—

was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning

obscured by its own

comic obsolescence.

The stuff of old films.

Funny and sad.

These days, I bear myself,

an atlas of cryptogeography in

two hands.

I balance the glass orb of my

empty eye,

refracting cartographic distortions

when I tip.

It rolls, and

I scry this crystal ball for direction

but it changes.

My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,

the way a still head

never made me tired.