The dead are for morticians & butchers to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son will leave a grounded wren or bat alone like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch in the driveway he stares. It’s dead, I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule: butterflies are too fragile to hold alive, just the brush of skin could rip a wing. He skims the orange & black whorls with only two fingers, the way he learned to feel the backs of starfish & horseshoe crabs at the zoo, the way he thinks we touch all strangers. I was sad to be born, he tells me, because it means I will die. I once loved someone I never touched. We played records & drank coffee from chipped bowls, but didn’t speak of the days pierced by radiation. A friend said: Let her pretend. She needs one person who doesn’t know. If I held her, I would have left bruises, if I undressed her, I would have seen scars, so we never touched & she never had to say she was dying. We should hold each other more while we are still alive, even if it hurts. People really die of loneliness, skin hunger the doctors call it. In a study on love, baby monkeys were given a choice between a wire mother with milk & a wool mother with none. Like them, I would choose to starve & hold the soft body.
Copyright © 2019 by Robin Beth Schaer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
I scare away rabbits stripping the strawberries
in the garden, ripened ovaries reddening
their mouths. You take down the hanging basket
and show it to our son—a nest, secret as a heart,
throbbing between flowers. Look, but don’t touch,
you instruct our son who has already begun
to reach for the black globes of a new bird’s eyes,
wanting to touch the world. To know it.
Disappointed, you say: Common house finch,
as if even banal miracles aren’t still pink
and blind and heaving with life. When the cat
your ex-wife gave you died, I was grateful.
I’d never seen a man grieve like that
for an animal. I held you like a victory,
embarrassed and relieved that this was how
you loved. To the bone of you. To the meat.
And we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy,
so we risk it. We do. Every day we take down
the basket and prove it to our son. Just look
at its rawness, its tenderness, it’s almost flying.
Copyright © 2017 by Traci Brimhall. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 26, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
The first time I saw my mother, she'd been dead fourteen years and came as a ghost in the mirror, plucking the hair beneath her arms, and humming a bossa nova. She lotioned her chapped heels and padded her bra as if she were alive in the old way. She said I was born with my cord wrapped around my neck like a rosary, and she knew God, the doomed father of her days, wanted us both. Before midnight she plaited my hair, hemmed my skirt, sang lullabies she'd learned on the other side of the flood. She lifted her dress to show her bones shedding light on a stillborn fetus accidentally raptured into her ribs. She said she'd choose her death again, obey any pain heaven gave her. Years ago she watched a man ride a diving bell to the bottom of the Amazon to face the mysteries God had placed there. The chain broke, and they pulled him to the surface smiling, stiff, refusing to open his fists. They broke and unpeeled his fingers. No one wept or fought to hold it. She covered her eyes so she wouldn't see what God, in his innocence, had done.
Copyright © 2012 by Traci Brimhall. Used with permission of the author.