How to photograph your mother / I
Carry the wilted plants into the rain
careful not to tremble and spill
the grains of soil that have
matted dry.
The malignant growth
in her brain, spring.
I wrap the fallen shoots in a perfumed
scarf—lavender. The same scent
the doctor remarked made him
want to stay in the room.
Just a moment longer.
Her body in a paper gown, crinkled with
breath. How to gauge the pulse.
There’s music in what we reveal,
what we let fold.
Typos of thought. If I picture her
collarbone and the sun is shatter-
bright, I can trick my mind
into believing the branch
is that part of her. And the sparrow—
delicately balanced—her fingers
winding course horsehair
into a braid.
The creased corners in an anatomy
book that the doctor uses to explain
degeneration.
A kind of connective tissue.
Dispatches from the Saloon
A man says he killed that damn coyote
as if I had asked about anything related to pelts,
or cackles, wanted slaughter, or taxidermy
advice and a drink—I’ve been told I’m hard to read.
I’d like to find the man who wrote tish tish on the canyon
wall in chalk to know just what he was chiding—
a lover, or rattler that bit his big toe and took feeling
from his feet, either way the cholla cactus
are blooming in the midday heat, but getting close
enough to marvel is like walking on the bottom
of the ocean and not without peril, which is something
my grandmother would say about crossing a two-
way street or wading through a department store
on a Sunday, her purse packed full of wrapped
candies and tissues just in case. No one really taught
me the basics for how to survive, only how to stay
ravenous, exist small on a diet of grapes, but someone
did mention that you can eat the unopened cholla
buds that taste not unlike an artichoke heart and that
the spines can be so loosely attached to the body
that they prick as if jumping into skin, maybe I
should forgive that man, maybe the coyote
was screaming because it was covered in needled
chunks, maybe poems should come with the same
warning: any puncture is susceptible to infection,
maybe I should ask for garnish with that drink.
