The live-wire of my body,
vigilant tuning fork, vibrates low.
Watching you walk, run, heave
a mottled brown ball toward netted hoop—impossible
to dream—a braided vision
of normality—I am no longer a chicken
pecking circles round your every moment,
as if that dance kept me from being
unzipped, or you, from falling.

Yet, each time your labs return
a notch too high or, a milky fog appears
inside one eye and your knuckles flare, grated
red, I curse the resurrected
hope-wagon I thought to ride on.
Still full of flint, ready for conflagration,
I would strip bark with my teeth, slice
the neck of pestilence—a fenestration
for cords coiled from my hair and flayed skin—
plait a lasso, harness, bower, anything
to keep the sky clear
of your unfurling.

(an earlier version to be published in Fall 2011 by UCSF Press Healing Art of Writing anthology)

No one wants to talk about the sick child,
corrugated sadness, apologies baited with fear
the mouse-trap faces of those with healthy kids, shut.

Nobody wants to stand too close to disease,
the thieving rat reaches into pockets,
through the body’s bars, swipes
skin-lush, flown-open dreams.

Stuck in binocular vision, I watch my child teeter
towards the ground. I should move, sit on her end
of the see-saw, leave the others
up in the air.

The fault line of child’s scalp
once unmapped, exposed, incised
from nape to forehead, nubby

cross-stitch swollen pink no
French knot elegance,
the doctor dusted off blade, this mother

steeled herself against sultry sinew,
against fracas of molecules pooling
where she wants incisive decision

no clapboard dashed-together nail
and rail affair—she wants tender
at the bone, the territory charted,

each one’s scan like Saturn’s
rings, familiar.
Light passes through orbital

bone, socket of eye, the world
her child sees but doesn’t
yet know, masses outside the gate.

Nose to your cheek
I am brighter than green
fire, no words break
the surface of dewdrops.

What I can say to you
comes in silver sounds the open
hollow harbors: the rosined hum
of cricket legs as they slow,
nightingale’s Morse code lullaby.

I want to bottle your daily
travels, whiffs of skin
my child, hold them—when you are
no longer near—that first memory
like bubbles rising from still water, not yet
letters on the page.