Two Poems

Swollen Empty

When the meltdown came, it smelled
red. Smoke the color of thunder.
The sirens are teaching me. This is how to panic
before you’ve met truth. Miscarry a summer.
The blood clots. My sisters and I tangle
like weeds in the heat. We’re getting bad
at the business of belief. Our stomachs swollen
empty. I caught the last goose in the shallows.
Her feathers came off in my hand. Her children,
capsized and bleeding. We didn’t eat her.
I found her new ones, like pearls. Perfect white
eyes rolled back. They’re buried now.
If the chicks ever hatch, they are already dead.

Teething

Every time you lose a tooth, you reverently place it in a cookie tin, slide the tin under your bed. There are twenty-three full tins, the tracks from their movements worn in deep as the floor’s grain. Each time it happens you say, “This will surely be the last.” You do not bleed. You do not wince. Just shudder at the small bone dislodging.

When you fell in love, it was difficult not to think of it as predatory. You thought yourself some apex predator. Invincible. A shark can smell blood from miles off; maybe it can smell fear too. But it is also the beast whose thoughts are punctured when you place a hand on its face.