Read My Mother's Body for Free Online

curls,
    kittens tumbling over kittens
    at nipples pink and upright
    against the silver blue fur.
    Her mrow interrogates.
    The second night she toted
    them one by one into my bed
    arranged them against my flank
    nuzzling, then took off
    flirting her tail.
    Birthing box, bottoms
    of closets, dark places,
    the hell with that. She
    crawled between my legs
    when her water broke.
    Think of them as
ours
    she urges us, have you
    heard of any decent day care?
    I think kitten raising
    should be a truly collective
    process, and besides, it’s all
    your fault. You gave me
    to that little silver-
    balled brute to do his will
    upon me. Now look.
    Here I am a hot-water
    bottle, an assembly line
    of tits, a milk factory.
    The least you can do
    is take the night feeding.

Magic mama
    The woman who shines with a dull comfortable glow.
    The woman who sweats honey, an aphid
    enrolled to sweeten the lives of others.
    The woman who puts down her work like knitting
    the moment you speak, but somehow it gets done
    secretly in the night while everyone sleeps.
    The woman whose lap is wide as the Nile
    delta, whose flesh is a lullaby
    of goosedown petals lacking the bite
    of menace real lullabies ride on
    (if the bough breaks, birds
    and butterflies pecking out his eyes).
    Whose own eyes are soft-focus mirrors.
    Whose arms are bolsters. Whose love
    is laid on like the municipal water.
    She is not the mother goddess, vortex
    of dark and light powers with her consorts,
    her hungers, her favorites, her temper
    blasting the corn so it withers in its ear,
    her bloody humor that sends the hunter fleeing
    to be tracked and torn by his hounds,
    the great door into the earth’s darkness
    where bones are rewoven into wheat,
    who loves the hawk as she loves the rabbit.
    Big mama has no power, not even over herself.
    The taxpayer of guilt, whatever she gives
    you both agree is never enough.
    She is a one-way street down which pour
    parades of opulent gifts and admiration
    from a three-shift factory of love.
    Magic mama has to make it right, straighten
    the crooked, ease pain, raise the darkness,
    feed the hungry and matchmake for the lonesome
    and ask nothing in return. If you win
    you no longer know her, and if you lose
    it is because her goodness failed you.
    Whenever you create big mama from another
    woman’s smile, a generosity of spirit working
    like yeast in the inert matter of the day,
    you are stealing from a woman her own ripe
    grape sweet desire, the must of her fears,
    the shadow she casts into her own future
    and turning her into a diaper service,
    the cleaning lady of your adventure.
    Who thanks a light bulb for giving light?
    Listen, your mother is not your mother.
    She is herself and unmothered. It is time
    to take the apron off your mind.

Nothing more will happen
    You are rumpled like a sweater
    smelling of burnt leaves and dried sea grasses.
    Your smile belongs to an archaic boy of wasting stone on Delos.
    You change shape like spilled mercury.
    There is no part of you that touches me
    not even your laugh catching like fur in your nose.
    I am with you on a glacier
    white snowfield gouged with blue-green crevasses
    deep and the color of your eyes.
    There is no place to go, we cannot lie down.
    In the distance your people wait checking their gear.
    We blaze like a refinery on the ice.
    A dry snow begins to descend
    as your hands fall clasped to your sides
    as your eyes freeze to the rim of the sky.
    Already I cannot see you for the snow.
    Heavy iron gates like those in a levee or fortress
    are closing in my breasts.

Blue Tuesday in August
    The world smelled like a mattress you find
    on the street and leave there,
    or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
    dinner menu and the day before’s.
    Everybody had breathed this air repeatedly
    and used it to cool an engine.
    Oil hung in the sky in queasy clouds.
    Then the rain swept through slamming doors.
    Today is blue as a cornflower,
    tall as a steel tower,
    springy as a