Steven Rood

What I Did

Looking into the cavity of a raw chicken

is like looking into the throat of my mother.

Reaching my hand into the cavity to pull out the liver

is like putting my fingers into her throat.

I fed my mother morphine from a dropper

into her open mouth.  She was a baby bird.

The nurse told me how to administer the doses

and the signs to look for.  Blotching of skin, 

trumpeting breaths, restlessness, sudden peace.

I don’t know if I did the right thing.

I would never be innocent again. 

Marriage

On the trail to Twin Peaks, I pass a woman in a mask.

She says something muffled about “many termites ahead.”

I say “Beetles?” thinking that beetles, not termites, bore the soft pinewood.

“No, termites,” she says.  I keep looking for a rising silver cloud of wings.  

Nothing.  Maybe I’ve lost my touch at seeing.

Then I find them: ten or fifteen turkeys eating quietly amid the wild oats.

By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat and Wept as We Remembered Zion 

I fell, hitting a greenstone boulder hard, tearing my elbow’s skin.

The blood dried quickly in the heat, forming a rust-dome. 

I walked through orange air; its taste taught me a meaning of orange.

I kept looking down so I wouldn’t trip again, missing 

whatever was the new beauty 

above me in the smoke.  Stopped to drink, rest.  

Nauseated, I tried concentrating on my breathing.

Reached a certain manzanita I’d known for thirty years.  

Muscled trunk— brick-red made redder by the red sun. 

Then I feel fists beating on the outside of my cranium.

I fight off the fists.  

At first I don’t see the boy, attached to the fists.  

When I do, he breaks through, beating me harder and weeping.

Is it for the trees combusting in the north? 

For both of us?  For the squadron of twenty-one turkeys 

overtaken by firestorm, 

a turkey feather here, another, and then all of them ash?

Before I know I’ve let him, he crawls onto my chest, arms around me.

I bring my cheek to his hair, sit with his weight in my lap beside the dry creek bed.

His weight about the same as my son’s when he was six.

Still, I don’t feel any better.  Just different.

Nen G Ramirez