Prairie Schooner

Bitch Sonnet

"Oh, get yourself a life," my mother snapped
because I'd said "poor thing" about the mother
dog that came around to nose the cat
food set outside for strays, its dangling udders
all its flesh that wasn't crimped to bone
like pie dough to a pan, its fur in patches –
ringworm or the mange. Three times I'd phoned
the pound, but always she'd outfoxed the catchers,
weakened as she was. My mother, pooped
from shopping Jackson Square for peacock feather
masks, sipped sherry in my living room
and lost her houseguest manners altogether:
"Get yourself a life," is what she said.
But, listen: I'm alive and she's long dead.

Berry-Picking

Not knowing we'd be picking berries on
the ranch my friend was losing to divorce
that day I came to help her pack her stuff,
I'd put on sandals and a pair of shorts.
My friend, in jeans and sneakers, had to do
some rote-like thing to get her mind off loss,
and I can still remember glancing down
to see the zigzag red embroidery floss [End Page 60]
of bramble-scratches stitched across my legs,
my feet and ankles stained from berry-juice,
a small adhesive bandage on one thigh
where I'd just had a berry-mole removed –
not knowing that my life, like hers, would be
divided into post- that day and pre-.

Whisker

Suddenly, this barb growing out of my chin,
as sharp as the quill on a porcupine:
the fault of a middle-aged shift in hormones,
that dot of the Other in the yin-yang sign.
It's springing up fast as a giant's beanstalk,
so rapidly I worry that my face,
cut open, might yield one mile-long hair
curled up like a spool of measuring tape.
Suppose I stopped cutting it back each morning,
relinquished my scissors, Sisyphe on strike:
would it twirl from my jaw like a catfish's whisker,
a kingbird's vibrissa, a bighorn sheep's spike,
a frayed piece of line from a fight-weary fish –
If I can't be a Bishop, could I be a witch? [End Page 61]

Aš Nekalbu Lietuviškai

To move to another country and not speak the language,
unable to tell where words start and end
in that river of speech-sounds, except when your name
is spoken, or cake, or some number one to ten,
is to be reborn as a one-year-old child
or a dog in the corner, its paws on its snout,
an astronaut drifting through galaxy static,
or blind Helen Keller, her hand in the spout.
Like that day in your childhood when millions of ladybugs
covered your swing-set, the sides of your house,
events reclaim a dimension of magic
when you don't have the language to ask why or how,
so that you almost dread the day the patter
locks to receptors in gray or white matter.