First Wilderness

Anxiety: A Creation Story

i. 
The TVA made electricity cheap for people in Appalachia.
                        The first light bulbs appeared               like angel heads
on the mountain that folks watched every night like a movie screen. 

After rinsing pork fat off the plates, what kind of feeling was it, 
            realizing they weren’t alone                  when they thought they’d been alone?

           It’s not like the mountain was theirs.

ii. 
Prometheus pitied cold humans’ uncooked meat, 
            resolving among themselves that night was night        and cold was cold,
                                                                        so he rebelled and gave them fire. 

Fire made worshiping the gods harder. 
                        Distracted by strobe lights, Mario Brothers, automated car washes, and possibility,
            human beings lost satisfaction. 
		
iii. 
Wielding a flashlight at night, I can’t make out what rustles in the trees – 
            stray owl or pitbull –                            and I can’t sleep thinking about it.

Beneath the light bulb, I find Ambien in the cabinet.
                        I find the waist of my love who fell asleep after the fight. 

It is night. There are many theres.                   Come here.

Matrescence

Through the monitor, I see the baby see the door,                  its cloud cover.

Once, I caught my mother leafing through my journal, ink drying on her mouth.
            Therapy gave me the word boundary. 		

He picks up a cloth rabbit and rubs his eyes, head bobbing like a man at church. 

When my mother read where I put my body on the weekends, 
I wanted to slam three doors, crawl through a carpeted passage, and climb into a truck. 

                        I will enter the room and lie his body flat and sing Edelweiss without breathing. 

When does the mother stop wanting to eat the space	
between her and the child                                though she pleaded in the dark for it?		

I judged my mother’s hunger, though my breasts
            swell with food                                                and precisely fill a mouth. 

First Wilderness

The first year of my son’s life, I quit weedeating. Let weeds flower. Shame left alone is a forest. The 
canary hovers in the milkweed’s white. I plant beef steak seeds and get cherries. Remove suckers too 
late. The baby’s front teeth puncture tomato skin, scrape juice. The first summer of my son’s life, 
worms eat the broccoli florets: exposed, supple, mortal. A wasp eats the worm, and I am in love 
with wasps. The first summer of my son’s life, my chest x-ray shows transient osteopenia, meaning 
when I wake with both tits emptied, my son has eaten my bones. A neighbor says Don’t make any big 
decisions this year. A sunflower leans away from home. A house with a baby in it is full of hands. I 
disappear. Perhaps I want to. Ivy crawls up the window like the window is a ripped seam. I call the 
seamstress and she says nothing is broken. Her needlework is serious, and she leaves holes 
everywhere.