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Poetry

sample from the winning collection entitled BirthSong

Cleaved Tangerine (2020)

Since becoming a mother

I’m told I should write about motherhood

Be a hen, baby tucked under wing

Be a bear, protecting the cub

But I wasn’t strong that day and I have proof,

a video I didn’t ask my sister to film in the operating room

of the moments my belly was pulled aside

like a loaf of bread broken, a tangerine cleaved

The doctor’s hands dipped into the dark pond,

the view focused on wet, blue surgical gloves

then another set of hands, fingers fanned splayed and waiting

to pull my baby towards someone else’s arms,

and in the background noise, beneath

the celebratory cheers and shouts

is my voice, a murmur

saying wait wait is it over?

I wasn’t a bear a bird but a body

broken by hands for sharing.

a winner of the Fish Poetry Prize

GOURDS

The chalk-white gourds floated

on fishing line that ran from the left corner

of my grandparents' roof to a square birdhouse

sitting atop a 25-foot pole that I tried

many times to monkey climb

only to slip and cut my hands

on the sheets of thick white paint

that peeled off. I would sit

in the soft dirt beneath the birds

and rest my back against the pole

to use the best pieces of paint

to free the debris beneath my nails

—paint, dirt, pencil lead, bark—

surfaces that felt good to run my nails

against when I wanted to calm

down, so I’d scratch them

back and forth back and forth back and forth

till my fingertips were as raw

as when I’d pry open 100 pistachios

and lay them in order of roughest

to smoothest jackets, tossing their nutshells

in a pink plastic bowl with a picture

of Winnie the Pooh dancing across the lip

of the rim, a growing mound

of dry salty shells I’d later try

to pinhole puncture using a thumbtack

and earring post and string the cream

crescents with thread like the curved floating

homes of the birds I wanted to climb to,

to cup in my palms and dip my fingers

gently within the warm folds of their silky wings,

to finally find a space for my hands to hold and be held.

Caroline R Freeman