Entrails

2023 Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner in poetry

2 Minutes Read Time

A desert plant with thin stems covered in spines. It's in half-light at sunset, with the sun behind it.
Photo by Diego Lozano on Unsplash
Pelvic bones are nothing like wings
or blades. I know because I saw them in a meadow

at Mount Diablo. They must have come from a mother cow,

birth canal a wide hollow. I touched
the wild rye that pulsed inside.

*

Once, in the desert, my mother
and I argued about the shape of the earth

until I wept. Wind chimes jangled in the garden.
I had sex, I told her. A hummingbird thrummed

its overtaxed heart to nectar. When she asked if
we’d used lubrication, my mouth wouldn’t form

that word for her, my first river: wet.
I blushed, thinking she meant pleasure.

*

Benzene and yellow pollen
—the black hose stretched

like an umbilical cord
as she spoke to me through

the car’s rolled-down window.
A gas station is no place

to be told your mother was raped,
but where would be better?

Inside of me, three clicks to close
securely, and the rest of the ride

devil cholla rooted in the desert,
its stars shaped from spines.

*

The holes drilled into cows’ abdomens
are called fistulas. A plastic ring holds

the flesh apart, fitted with a lid like a fuel
cap—twist to the left—so researchers

can insert their arms. A porthole
to the rumen. At the county fair

a man wearing an Eat Beef T-shirt
demonstrates: You can stick your hand in

as far as you’d like. He pulls, from the hole
in the cow, a clump of undigested grain.

*

I used to be unable to hear violation

without violet, trailing wisp
of elation—until the word
slipped its sonic skin like

grass to blade.

*

A healer tells my mother
she has a wall around her heart

made of red carnelian,
a stone used to ward

off the plague. In some people,
the wall is made of cinder blocks.

In others, Hello Kitty stickers.
Whatever they had on hand.

*

Last night, after he had cum,
I watched him stroke the leaves

of the monstera with his thumb.
Later, after a long walk home,

I touched myself, breathing
in the dark like the cows

in the Carruth poem I’ve never
known whether I hate or love.

*

Look at your hands, an old man instructs
me. They have done gentle things.

They have done ungentle things.
We sit on a lakeshore, strangers until

I told him I was searching for a way in
to a poem. Asbell, he says. His last name.

The ungentle thing I have done:
reaching inside of.

*

Like a blanket smoothed with both palms,
the earth is flat enough, she said, to lie down on.

Read more from Issue 21.1.

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