Anya’s Garden

    Meggie royer

 

 

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There was no real evidence for their origin,

their small and elfin bodies,

faint trace of tequila around the ears.

The day we brought them into our home

the whole town was flooded with darkness,

all the men taken to filling the mouths of glass lamps

with honeyed kerosene.

The women did their best to nurse them

back to health, milked until it shone

like drippings of the moon.

Beneath the sky opening like an orange palm

we thought of all the children

buried in garbage chutes

or pressed beneath stones at the bottom

of the river, wailing

as if it could bring down the stars.

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Genesis

 

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When Noah cleaved the water with his ark

he expected the animals to save him.

Once, my mother convinced me a c-section

was just Moses parting women’s inner seas,

that magic thrived in the things

we didn’t know how to name.

It was always breaking something

that undid you.

The coke into lines with the blade,

a heart, the horizon, the yolk.

Back at detox I knew

you wished to find a way back in

to the place she birthed you from,

to stay quiet like a stone

in the belly of an ocean.

We expected you to save yourself too

and in the end it flooded.