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  • Long Division with Alligators, and: Feminist, and: Man, Dead, Swimming
  • Mary Fontana (bio)

Long Division with Alligators

On the lake path the weeds turn overshowing their scaly bellies. A man has told usof two or three gators roughing up the swampat the path mouth and, later on, a twelve footer.My uncle beats for snakes. He says, standclear of your brother at the river edge—he may turn and run at any minute.This strip's thick with three-legged dogs.

There's my mama, a kid sister in braidsand flip-flops, two brothers and me and the nestingspoonbills, medicine pink, and cruising through usunseen rafts of chilly hunger. Trees cry lichen.Come back, my mother calls. Oh yes, yes,her kids are on adventure—                                    never seen one

this close, eye-lumps popping from the scumof the green swamp, the casual sprawl of the tailthat sends the gator under. My sister leans outfrom the bank on the knees of a cypressin those flip-flops the ants bite through.Come back—and I see my mother's mouth,see under the sudden moss of her face the reptile fear,see my sister's reflection one minute closerto her death.

                        How must it be for my motherevery minute, mother of the athlete, the hero—for this lifeis an epic, gambled on by the long-fingeredgod of separation—how does she live with her heartnot safe in her throat, a pill she can swallow,

but wholly apart, gliding through the worldin four other bodies? The children pulled from her [End Page 151] as pots from the wheel.Oh, it is cruel, cruel—

the knock of the bark-armored tail against the mangrovethat shivers the nest, bullying a scruffy egretdown to the schoolyard of the swamp. A stiff brushof feathers means it hasn't fledged yet.They say birds made the long descentfrom ancient alligators, heirs of their stone gulletsand heartbreaking appetites. If so,when the relatives collide with vicious passionthat plume of blood is the return of something once given.

We watch alligator pull egret under.It's the children's turn to be horrified.My mother knows this wreck already—the sudden spacebetween one bone and the next, air let inwhere blood and tendon were. Knows the heart beats

improbably, against all odds, pegged to a bodyas much by fear as anything. Once wrestled out and brokenthe pieces of a heart will grow again—become new thingsas a starfish cut along each arm becomesfive starfish. Each one none the wiser.

Feminist

Blackberries spilled through her front yard,lanterns full of dark sugar. She woreher pink skirts among the bushes till they bled.School was a different storyevery day: Balboa discovering the Pacific, [End Page 152] Petrarch discovering love. When Madame Curiediscovered radium she died of cancer.

Her name was Luthien, and her feet twinkled like stars.Her name was Eva, and she got blamed for everything.Her name was Ann, and she lost her head.We use this phrase for love as well as murder.Her name was Portia, and Solomon was an admirer.

Oh, one day Virginia really did lose her headin the valentine sense, blindly. She loved everything.Her lucid hips and the way the salt duckedover the bow of her sailing boat delighted her.She loved men: they bowled straight at answersand their chins were like mown lawns.She loved women too, their smart hands, the heartsfull of tiny rooms opening into other rooms.

Today she thinks: I too have such a heart.Mercedes walks a street made of billboards.She weaves a family from a spider web of compromises.Over her shoulder Madame Curie glowslike a quarantined star, queasily brilliant. By that lightshe reads Aristotle and by it she comes homein the early mornings, stockings askew.Something hardens—anger or a barnacle.Suddenly she is always shouting. The doorsin her heart close two by two by two.She loves everything, everything.

One day she will kill herself by...

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