It’s Monday night, and a car is blocking the dumpster
with the DO NOT BLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT sign on it.
And there was never any hope that things would go as hoped.
Walking home from my job I wanted, on the morning of day one,
to love, I might as well be putting a book over my heart and allowing
the bullet through anyway. There was never any hope for such a thing
as being born to be ecstatic about everything.
The traffic at this intersection is just terrible. The little store
sells beer to minors. I’m out of gum. I refuse to go in there,
where the light of the world is so dim.
God knows when you’re in a rotten mood
you should just examine your knuckles,
as much as your skin will allow, get home
from your job, or wherever you’ve been,
and sit down and examine your invisible
prowess.…
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When I was younger, my mother turned into
oncoming traffic & I was too scared
to interrupt her—to warn her of the cars
coming towards us. I thought silent was the right
thing to be. Since then I’ve never been confident
in my body & its abilities. I see full trash bags
in fields or on busy streets. I want to tear into them
& look inside, hoping I will find the body
someone went looking for, so it is no longer left
unclaimed—decomposing alone, becoming
a host & a habitat for everything avoidable.
If I can’t find my own, I want to search
the streets—spread throughout bodies
freely, a displacement of tons. I want to run
wildly across streets with animals before they hit
the cars, before they’re moved onto the solid white line
waiting for their pickup time.…
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It would be, I told
my mother, better though clueless
is, as smart people say, the only
truth in cancer.
Within the world
opposite us, smart people were leaving
Baghdad, war plans prepared.
A port appeared
beneath her clavicle, fluid in tubes
though eyes turned to a top general
fingering before smart people a vial meant
to worry nations.
…
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Because to appreciate
the natural world is to lament its swift decline
over the last
hundred years or so, on miraculous water
I not only walk,
but also stand still.
What am I saying?
Rain is still until it falls, I tell myself, as if
pressing a depreciated
leaf—mint or maple—branched off from an expired,
but not tired,
plant or tree—between two fingers, mine,
or my other hand’s.
Rain is
still until I listen
to it drinking from the roots of the tender young shoots,
but not tendrils,
of an elongated plant, or a minute tree, testing,
but not tasting,
the dead air, and falling and falling through it,
and adding,
all around me, nothing
new. Now I fathom all I can rely on when I rely on
the slow, so
slow, almost time-lapsed, natural world.…
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“What do we do now?” my mother asks,
sitting where my grandmother used to sit
at the kitchen table. Her siblings have joined her,
their four chairs cardinal points on a newly restored
compass. They think we, the six grandchildren,
can’t hear them now that they have sent us
to the living room to play Clue and watch the Red Sox.
But their voices are approaching thunder
to our listening hearts, which are soft and unripened
even though we have lost before and our ages range
from sixteen to thirty. …
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He’s ours the whole night through
and there’s no shaking this problem.
(We’ll do better with the next one.)
My crooked nose on that misshapen skull,
you started brewing on that second date
when I went home alone
hating your father for all I hadn’t done.
I swore to my mother I would never have you—
not you, of course, I didn’t know you then—
but some you I couldn’t oblige, squeezed
out of this swollen, bleeding bluff
that could not imagine swallowing pain for anyone but herself.
And I still can’t—sometimes I don’t know if I chose you or if I allowed you,
if I wanted you or if I accepted you.
But what’s the difference, when I choose you now?
You’re here, my Wednesday prince.…
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R32 is hurting again.
Without looking at me,
a dentist I didn’t know
told me R32 moved onto a nerve
& I’ll hurt to the touch for a few days.
I couldn’t stop rubbing
the side of my jaw
& I asked my mother
if this is how it felt
when her lover broke hers.
I asked to paint her X-rays
to see if I could mend
her jaw with my strokes
& colors. I promised her
I wouldn’t paint her teeth
in black & white.
But my mother told me to balance
gravity in the back of my mouth,
the pressure will make R32 fall
into my throat, leaving
my nerve alone,
but I was too afraid
to swallow
my teeth.
– Annie Cigic
Author’s Note: My poetry often focuses on themes of motherhood, the body, unconventional relationships, and adoption.…
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