COLD ANGEL OF MERCY

You Don’t Have to Go Far to Be Damaged

28 You Don’t Have to Go Far to Be Damaged 1 I found a trucker named Jim, scaled knuckles, thin whistle when he spoke, drove me three days and nights through prairie lightning storms to that awful husband of mine living out his sentence in St. Joseph. Jim said, take that child back toTexas. But I had already crossed over those burned-out fields, made a promise I meant to keep. His kindness made him old and there was a stepping off in his eyes, in those green suns, when we entered the city limits. I gave him a white moth’s wing, and the plastic ring box I kept it in. 2 My sister slapped me when the rabbit shit on her arm. Some injustices are too small to make their own places. I hosed down the cage, watched the water enter clear and exit black. 29 3 Blackbirds applaud over the prairie. I’ve had dreams lately about hills that bask belly-up, a million years drawing great breaths of sun. The landscape subsides into flatness, unwavering. Jim wants to put me in his novel. What color would you say your hair was? Blackbirds fall in an ash-colored snow. 4 A February frost makes the grass stand on edge. As I walk across the yard for the morning news, my toes cannot feel the rest of me. One end of me now sleeping. The mind keeps working. How strange the body. 5 I thought about church this morning, how to find healing from the mouth of the dog that keeps snapping at me. My mother wouldn’t understand. I pull a knife from the drying rack, cut the tip of my index finger. My son, now five, lit with questions, wants to know if I’m trying to kill myself. But I only want to kill this virgin carcass that reclines, plucked clean, on my cutting board. 30 6 I want to be blessed, burned into history and grafted onto the souls of the suffering. My father and mother would remember my name, would know what all this nonsense means. I want my son to know how far I carried him, through the summer, the fields smoking, through the year’s first snow, in St. Joseph, aching, the moon still broken and the two of us lying in a cold bed, one not knowing the other dreams about grass fires and her body dancing touched in the flames. ...