Dear Siri
My son says you’re listening so you might tell us what we want. If so, I want to know what is lost under my fingertips besides home? And whether you understand that I googled postpartum depression after the first year, & I’ve since been bombarded by ads for crop tops, & pesticides, & sites that claim breastfeeding is best. What have the dandelions done to harm anyone? And what can you do about two sides of any argument involving windows? Day or night, night or day. If breath is an argument against failure, what is love? What is love? What is softness when my brother is my jailor? When my brother is my employer, & work is this toxic place I can’t escape in sleep. When I don’t sleep anymore. When my life is dependent on a man for money. What year is it? Can you remind me where the year went as I backslid into a ditch beside the highway in freezing rain? I took a layoff. After I wasn’t refused maternity leave, but it was insinuated that my job would not exist later if I took time off. Did you know? I saw the 6 tools to cure PPD & anxiety that you suggested. Of 5 tools, I am uncertain. But I am certain about trees. How long they will remain after none of this matters. My son has had a terrible year. He too sat in a dark room. He was bullied. I’ve tried everything to get him to come out. He likes basketball & bike rides. I can’t decide if the world is the reason for unreason. Why I can’t get out of bed. Why the body is imaginary after a baby. Why I can’t hope. Or am I hormonal? I don’t know. My son, too, has been hormonal. A teenager now. The baby, a surprise. Could you not have let me know? Let me down. Let down your milk so I can hear the baby cry from another room. Or did your milk fail to come in too? I read about the baby formula shortage on my feed. Before what befell any of us was called an accident. I read about the accident last night. The baby, the mother. The red barn lost in the field. What emerges from the shadow of another. How to see with four sets of eyes? Or six? Do you know? I gave birth three times. Sometimes, they all lived. Sometimes, I’m in the field watching the horses graze on fog through my children’s eyes. In each revision, the cloud around the sun re-sees itself. Admit it. No one knows what they will have to survive. What truth. What lie.
To See Anything Clearly is to Acknowledge the Gap Between the Object & the Eye
It’s hard to say what I’ve asked of my life—
someone dead sings on the car radio, another half
-slipped hallelujah. I pull the car over. The river there is high,
is a drunken whisper in the deadened
wood. The dreaded current crashes through me. It’s not that it could happen
to anyone. It’s that I can’t believe anyone dies
while there is still singing. A voice scraping the night
from its hiding place. From water, its need. I don’t understand
if faith takes the shape of the body I was last
held by, or if it is your dying that I’ve been
small inside. I don’t understand how to endure
mercy, only that you were human in that fresh water, your boots too
heavy. I don’t understand love as you move in me
while I am alone here. I don’t understand how a river
can ask anything, let alone that someone wade inside it
as though inside the night itself. I don’t understand the cry of that night
on my skin. As it calls you back. As it calls you back
to water that closed your eyes. I don’t understand why water must first fall
to be whole. I don’t understand the dailiness of sorrow. This age. That my body said, yes,
though I deny its sentences. The tiny eternities of the moth
flowers. That any choir might carry. That I might stand on these banks until
everywhere, even water, heaves up light.
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