After Birth By Devon Walker-Figueroa
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.
Summary
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