A Turn of the Plow, a Furrow, a Line of Writing

When the drought filled with fire,
the men thought maybe it’s natural
after all, and when the grave
filled with wombs, they said
it’s just a matter of time.
Women bit their lips as they’d been taught,
to draw more color to their mouths
but also to hold the word
they knew not to say, no: no
to fire taking horses, vineyards, the old
too slow to get out; no to drought
taking the garden as if the angel’s sword
had fallen from its hand and took root;
no to the graves of women
who gave birth and died
or tried not to and paid
with their lives; no to the womb
about which men wrote laws
and tried to enter again and again
on account of the verse
about loving the way of a man
with a virgin, with a young girl
and trying to say that doesn’t mean
what you thought.

by Angie Macri

American Lotus

The child sits on the flower with his mother,
finger in his mouth,
suspended in quiet water, insistent
water where there never should have been a city,
a lotus pillar,
a crown, city underwater,
dim.

The flower anchors underwater
with a root as big as the mother’s arm
and so the child becomes a god, his eyes
the flowers, the right
the sun, the left removed,
replaced with the moon,
something dimmer.

The mother anchors the child to the ground
underwater, a continent
the largest flower
and all its names, water chinquapin,
yancopin.
The water, bear oil, moves slow
where the city never should have been,

now a bend, a field, floodplain again,
incandescent,
the flowers with more than twenty petals.
She grinds their seeds to flour.
The child, his finger in his mouth, sits
with his mother, all eyes from ground to flower
where a city ends.

by Angie Macri