Search All Winners

That I commune with the dead as I oil your feet. My house at the throat of the river, the door to this world, I wait for you. That I ask of the spirit and receive the knowledges: yerbabuena, vela de virgen, baño de alhucema. Cut the joint at the hoof & fatten the soup. Accept this offering, thank the plant. That I love you with the knowledge of our ways lost to violence. That you will call me up from the silt in your bones.

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t 

stop leaving. I don’t know how

to name what I don’t know

well enough to render

in a single sitting. Every poem

about us seems an impossible labor,

like forgetting the face

of the sea, or trying to find

a more perfect name for water.

In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping

shower steam kept us invisible,

but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.

Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.

Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts

in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged

her ruler, and we printed the same confession

a hundred times, her shadow crossing

our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old

spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped

locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.

Heather gave birth so often she forgot,

she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost

in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye

in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.

Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,

how we strolled, arms linked, singing,

into the world of women where all deaths begin.

Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,

brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot

where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,

and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –

the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,

a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.