Swamps

Seventeen
the night I parked my hand-me-down
Chevy on the gravel road
miles from the closed signs
decorating the windows
of the shops in town

stripped naked in the headlights
and ran
until the rocks and frozen corn stalks
bloodied my feet.

A baptism of
gray breath and snow
on the plains that made me
a woman.

Twenty-
three years a woman
when the mountains made me a poet.

Bummed cigarettes
and narratives
from boys with long hair
and girls with big muscles

blunt bangs and a coolness
dissolving with the youth
’round the corners
of my eyes.

Just shy of thirty,
those poems
-feasting, rotting
on the river bottom-

unravel downstream,
arrive seconds, lifetimes
before the universe explodes
as a slow trickle
a Gulf-like rupture

in the swamp that makes me
a mother.

The Kingdom Stays in Heat

Oxytocin cannot
stop
the thirst of saber- toothed tigers
or keep millennia of ice at bay.

Wild animals and our ancestors alike
knew very little about
keeping their young alive.

The milk still lets down.

Antelope run the minute they’re born.
they have no choice, as tigers
learn soon after.

Our heads too large to hold,
there is no running from influenza
or plague-infested fleas.

The endorphins still collapse.

There is a reason wombs overflowed
the kingdom stayed in heat,
the tribes grew.

The promise of outliving our children
is three generations old
at best.

The belly still softens.

So we keep a few drops of bathwater
and the fingernail clippings
as insurance we won’t forget.

If we ever come to know
the heartache familiar
to the women who came before.

The fear still consumes.

Brakes

She tells anyone she knows
about the elevator special she once saw on PBS.

About how, if everyone selected their floors
before they got on, elevators could be thirty-three percent more efficient.

She shows them first hand, how the door close button
is a ruse to make riders feel more in control.

She abstains from sharing how the elevator structure
of the World Trade Centers contributed to hundreds of deaths.

The weight of the cables too much for one elevator.
Two, maybe three, stacked atop each other.
A lobby at the base of each, with the
panicked overflow of stairways, wall to wall.

Bone and blood into dust on impact.
Neither steel nor limb immune from the crippling.

No one wants to ponder their potential fates as one of the
twenty-seven elevator related deaths annually.

Especially as the doors are closing.

When they ask why she knows this amalgam of facts,
she mentions her fear of plummeting to death, and laughs.

Doubling back with some remark about insomnia and channel surfing.
All the while, she thinks of the difference between Otis Tufts and Elisha Otis.
About engines and brakes.
How, like her, one of them had something to lose.