After Birth

Reed, who’s got one strike left   before he gets

   life, tells me afterbirth is what the cougars are after.

“Lambing season,” he says, “plus, placenta’s a delicacy

         to a cat.” I try to explain how

intent they were, how their intentions appeared

        to involve me, but Reed won’t hear

a word. My    mother takes me at my word & won’t

  let me leave the house. So I learn to regret

     my story, sit indoors       for weeks, watching

for hunters, only to find what’s hunted: the gray

        diggers interring green

walnuts at the feet of the tree    they fell from. Now

all I can think of is blood, how we first feed

                                              on it without knowing

we feed on it or that it possesses   a plan all its own. Every girl

                 I know has started, nicknamed it

Florence or Flo or the Red Badge   of Courage. It’ll be years

   for me. When a doctor finally says      I’ve fallen so far

                                 off the growth chart he’s worried

I won’t find my way back,     I’m fourteen

                           & can still go out shirtless

without causing a stir. “Eat more butter,” he says, but I don’t

        yet believe      what I eat will help me hate

        my body any less. Reed doesn’t hate

his kids. He loves them      too much is the story. People tell me

        to avoid him, but I don’t. His flock grazes

the fields I drag      my shadow over & I    have nothing

    better to do than gaze at the perpetual       feeding, mumbling

Exodus under my breath,    some passage      about bearing

                            false witness. & somehow I think I know

       by now that knowing involves the senses turning a touch

licentious. My parents     haven’t known each other in years

        & no one wants    to know me either. A tree falls

                 in the woods. Consensus leaves    us cold, etc.

Green Eggs and Ham,       I really dislike that kid’s book, with all

    its I-would-nots & could-nots on boats & in woods,

all its reds & its greens inter-         mingled, muck of inks

      you should never swallow. A doctor hands me

           a copy, says, “eat up” & pulls a polyester curtain

between us. I’m three & can’t yet read

                 any word on my own    but “God.” He reaches

his hand, gloved         green, inside my mother & says,

   “what about this weather we are

                                 having?” Just between us,

I warn the story’s      star not to touch

                  its plate, but in the end it’ll do

   what the good Dr.’s scripted. I throw

                               the book. My mother stops singing

beneath a stream of steaming

                    water, a red-black mass dehiscing

at her feet. “Find    your father,”

she commands, so I run

                      through yellow meadows, yelling

   his name, his name, which the hills give back

to me, though he can’t        hear them from the other side

                           of this state. On the other

    side of this state, my mother

                          finds her first horse. It is 1980, decade

of the single-wide & no-children-in-the-

                          picture. Just a mare called Chianti

        who dies one year

before I’m born. Her heart, size of a child’s    globe, fails

while foaling, something involving      a length of decayed

               intestine & great        pain. My parents take

great pains to save        her, but the foal will lose

                        her         the instant             the air

enters his chest. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, “I” can be rendered

     as a single reed & “meadow” as a row of three

reeds bound by a flatline   of horizon. I know little,

                              even now, though enough

             to say my name & know it isn’t

mine, but just       an inadvertent testament

      to my mother’s love of horses & “good

breeding.” In an ancient Seventeen

               Magazine, a British teenager of means

straddles a dappled pure-

         bred bearing my name. 17, the age I am

when my interior starts giving up

        the way it’s meant to,          with blood,

& thanks       only to pregnant mares held

       captive, their urine stolen for the green

       tablets I’m made to swallow. & though I feel

like a martyr outgrowing      martyrdom when it happens,

      a sacrifice of sorts is still

                    taking place inside me. I admit I’m kind

      of a poser sometimes,    like when I convince my best

friend Ann I’ve started,     when in fact I’ve only used

               my mother’s lipstick          to tint my underpants

      the right shade of red. I’m the first

     to admit I’ve begun     to forget my mother’s

writing as it appears      in Arabian Horse World, some piece

         on giving         birth & up & tricking a strange

mare into caring for a foal            not hers by painting it up,

    by daubing         it down, in the afterbirth of her still-

             born. What more could one ask for?

My mother once rubbed moonshine on my gums to numb the pain

appearing inside me. Moonshine,      the name given the foal

       dressed in after-       birth & therefore breathing.