To the Reader

Out here, in darkness, the rain knocks against the earth, unlocking tiny doors in the dirt of the garden. You have spent your whole life so far trying to bear your body as a blessing. Now you are waiting, with an empty suitcase, between your father's tool shed and the high, rough fence of the neighbors' garden, and whatever it is the rain sets free from the soil, it tastes like the vacancy of the grave, like the hunger you discovered as you entered this world—released from the grip of your mother's body and passed, fully condemned, into the slack cage of your father's arms: the brand-new loneliness of the body you were given. This emptiness is the only thing you have that will always belong to you. You watch your mother in the thin bone-light of her kitchen: she is singing, but you can't hear it. You watch her red mouth pulse open like a wound. And then close. She looks like a butcher in her shiny apron, shaving the skins from the carrots and potatoes. You want her to abandon the peels stacked like scrolls on the counter and walk, weeping, out into the rain in her new slippers; you want her to crawl, weeping, on her knees in darkness, turning every stone in the garden, to part the tall stems of the hollyhocks weeping and calling your name. You want her to believe you are lost like one of the dead. Just once would mean everything and be enough. You were born in darkness, your mother once said, before dawn— she remembers the milkman whistling up the drive, the scrape of bottles on the grit of the top step; that your father was out, at the bottom of the garden, his torch tossed down in the grass, digging a hole in which he'd set your placenta and a sapling that would later grow waxy, long- throated blossoms no one can name. Even in summer those flowers will fill with shadow and not once will the bees ever enter their slick hallways. Soon you will go inside and say nothing, and your mother will go on believing the appetite you have is literal. You came into this world, she once said, without a single sound. There's a prayer we send out, in darkness, toward darkness. And your heart, out of habit, keeps on saying it: Mother, it whispers, mother, mother. Meaning: my jailer and my liberator. I never worried, your mother will tell you years from now; I always knew you'd come home when you were hungry. Meaning: I'm not sure how to love you now that I have turned you loose from the prison of my body, into this greater and less literal darkness.