From “Reconstructions” by Brad Trumpfheller

From “Reconstructions”

 

I won’t explain. My aunts spell

                                                                                 around the vanity mirror

& centerpiece me, my lips plummed,

                                                        my neck belled mid-flight.

 

                 After the food’s uncooked, the heirloom paring knife

stitched up the bell peppers & dark meat,

                                                                    after the fiddle leaves

                             left their fiddles, the porch undressed of wasps & us

our old names—

                                          right here. As if even the evening

           didn’t let on. No parking lot, no gas stations. A scythe

of emptied prisons shudder

                                                       alongside the highway; bougainvillea

& gun oil in the sheets. All my cousins slow-dancing

                              in their cowboy boots & antlers.

 

                                          My mothers singing to the dogwood tree

             blooming black across my arm.

 

Your hand finally on the small of my back, without any kind of fear.

 

This time, I’ll be a girl & you can be anything

alive. Take the rope off your wrists.

                                                      Somewhere far away from here,

               a star’s unspooling its star-white curtain.

 

                                          What happens if we begin already angels?

Press your ears to my wingspan. Hum a little.

 

We are the most possible kind of daughterhood.

                                                                                    I promise.

 

Step into the light.

            Let me see the mark our rapture left behind.