Root Causes

 
My father was raised on cow’s milk from birth,
wouldn’t take to his mother, left me in a field. My father

fell asleep by the campfire. When I took this body,
he put me in a flame. Five times

into the river, I went. I was baptized in the church
of my mother, all white robed and death

to sin, but no, nothing would turn me back
to that girl he left in the forest, abandoned.

He dragged me over the hills he came from, Ohio’s
Appalachia, ancient, history unraveling like skin

in little pockets of soil and you grew there, Daisy,
little bud of me. We were born of eternal numbers:

eight moons, eight worlds, two circles
linked. We dance eight nights in eight skins.

We are so honest. Carry a twin diagnosis.
What can I give you of my childhood

but this body of my father, a beet I blend
into your smoothie.

*

Divergent Opinions

 
My daughter tells me 1+1=window:
the spaces. The frame. In her Montessori school,
she studies elephant numbers. She is told she is strange
by a girl who can’t see numbers as windows,
will never know that twos are close to hearts,
that an eight is both lucky and unlucky,
because of Saturn, somehow, or Satan,
somehow, words always creating other words,
depending on your understanding of things
like suffering and death, whether you say
four or shi, autism or spectrum, desire
or eros, repetition or desire.
If you believe in numbers
and curses, there are unlucky numbers,
thirteen and six, the round slope of nine
which in Japanese sounds like suffering. Four
is death, shi. One day, she’ll hear this
and, maybe, it will make her feel
like a window or opening, like space
unravels.

*

On Changelings

 
In the ceremony, I bathe in a pool
my father dug for me, bathe
in the white dress my mother wore
until it melts to soapy residue,
coats the yard like Christmas snow.
My skin pills gray stones, gravels
me. I am a driveway now.
It’s my driveway to my house.
I am not the girl who threw curses
carved into broken branches
into the well until that well
knew all our names, even the secret ones:
Winter, Crane Fly, Loss.
I take ibuprofen now at night to sleep
through the things I’ve done and undone,
the call of that old well. It drew and then
receded into the ground supply, taking
with it every sacred want for violence,
every prayerful unraveling, like my voice
was a ribbon on a tree. Father. Father,
see me kneeling, half girl, half stone.
I am made in the image of things like kettle,
lamp, bookcase. My mother rinsing
clay from her face. I am made to hold something
and provide, to service with my body
and mind. I am clinging to the earth
as if it were a road and not just the way
in, always in, smooth as asphalt, almost
real. I am almost ready to unfold my hand and show
you what it is I’ve been holding, whose name.
Each night, how my mother rinsed
clay from her face.
My daughter’s.

***

(Featured image from Pexels)