Ingredients for the Unmaking
- Ingredients for the Unmaking
Her propensity to worryscabs, trust strangers, blush.
4 pounds of blood and a fistful of forget-me-notsdangling over the rim of a pill bottle.
Earnest sympathy for every feveryou ever faked or
the hiss of hydrogenperoxide on a dog bite.
Hamburger loaves,a lab technician digging for a vein.
The little box on the dresser, the one crowdedwith kernels of milk teeth—their dark centers.
Hereditary terror of crowsof thunder of the cellar of
Everything she ever bought you in lavender.The bat from the attic, wings broken like umbrella spokes.
Lullabies, the creamquietly curdling on the table.
This rubber summer. A miraculousmedal in the glove box.
Treatable symptomsand a firm handshake.
Succor for the dead.A face like crumpled laundry. [End Page 39]
Cate McLaughlin is in the second year of an MFA program at Syracuse University. Her chapbook, The Year of Black Coffee (2008), was published by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. When she can, she lives and writes in western Massachusetts.
