Anna Journey Poems

for David

We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green
sliver on her tongue, that its watery
...

I've wanted to visit the genetically modified goat
spliced with silkworm DNA
spinning white threads from its pink udders
like a piebald spider. I've wondered how much
...

My ex-lover received it at seventeen
skiing the steep slope at Wintergreen called

Devil's Elbow. The early snowmelt along the Blue
Ridge had slipped the white limb of a birch

through the crust, jutted that camouflaged tip
into the center of the trail. He hit it, full speed,

flipped over his ski poles. One of them split
his vocal cords with its aluminum point. He sprawled

in the snow, his pink throat skewered like Saint
Sebastian or the raw quiver of his Greek father's

peppered lamb kebobs. The doctors didn't let him speak
for a year and when he finally tried his choirboy

voice had gravel in it. His tenor had a bloody
birch limb in it, had a knife in it, had a whole lower

octave clotted in it, had a wound and a wound's
cracked whisper in it. The first time I heard him

sing in his blues band, five years after the accident,
I told him his smoked rasp sounded

exactly like Tom Waits. Like my grandfather
sixty years since the iron lung. I couldn't believe

a growl like that crawled up from the lips
of a former Catholic schoolboy. But as he shut off

the halogen overhead—leaving only the ultraviolet
of his bedside's black light—he stroked my cheek,

crooned, Goodnight, Irene. His teeth and his throat's
three-inch scar glowed a green neon.
...

My parents come from a place where all the houses stop
at one story

for the heat. Where every porch—front
and back—simmers in black screens that sieve

mosquitoes from our blood. Where everyone knows
there's only one kind of tea:

served sweet. The first time my father
introduced my mother to his parents,

his mother made my mother change
the bed sheets in the guest room. She'd believed it

a gesture of intimacy. My grandmother
saved lavender hotel soaps and lotions

to wrap and mail as gifts at Christmas. My grandfather
once shot the head off a rattlesnake

in the gravel driveway of the house he built
in Greenwood. He gave the dry rattle to my mother

the same week I was born, saying, Why don't you
make something out of it.
...

I've wanted to visit the genetically modified goat
spliced with silkworm DNA
spinning white threads from its pink udders
like a piebald spider. I've wondered how much
for a whole goat silk dress? Always I save
the spiders that shimmy near my eyes
but never the bristled silverfish
which drop to the boatwood dinner table
from the skylight. Come Indian Summer
the fuchsia bougainvillea unpurses
its dry lips, licks the sweat
from my neck. My mother tells her childhood
best friend—who's dying from liver
cancer in Jackson, who consults
a Pentecostal woman who speaks
in tongues—that her two daughters
are atheists. Meaning my little sister and me.
Somewhere there's a goat that squirts
a rare silk so bizarre maybe
no one would actually wear it. That webbed dress
sticking to my chest, the grandfather
clock, all over the bedroom walls like a past
that drags everything with it. The thread
leading back to an animal I badly
need to believe in. Its impossible milk
steams in the twilight. There's a dress
that rises from its udders with a misted
sleeve I can almost see.
...

for David

We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green
sliver on her tongue, that its watery

disk caught the lamplight before
she slipped from her yacht

to drown in the waves off this island. This was
thirty years ago. And our tomato's strain

stretches back decades, to an heirloom seed
saved before either of us was born,

before Natalie's elbow
brushed the clouded jade

face of the ancestral fruit
in a Catalina stand, before she handed it

to her husband, saying, This one. We hover
near the plate, where the last

half of our shadowed tomato
sits in its skin's deep pleats. I lean

toward you to trace each
salted crease with a thumbnail—

brined and wild as those lines
clawed in the green

side of the yacht's
rubber dinghy. Those lingering

shapes the coroner found—the drowned
actress's scratch marks. That night

we first met, I had another lover
but you didn't

care. My Bellini's peach puree,
our waiter said, had sailed across

the Atlantic, from France. It swirled
as I sipped and sank

to the glass bottom
of my champagne flute. You whispered,

Guilt is the most
useless emotion. After Natalie rolled

into the waves, the wet feathers
of her down coat wrapped

their white anchors
at her hips. This was 1981. I turned

a year old that month and somewhere
an heirloom seed

washed up. You felt an odd breeze
knock at your elbow as I took

my first step. We hadn't yet met.
Tonight, we watch the wet date palms tip

toward the surf and, curling,
swallow their tongues.
...

Turns out my body's a dollar sweet potato
her register's screen said, as she lifted

her scanner, and I laughed. I can finally call myself
Garnet, Georgia Jet, Carolina Red. Those names

of tubers—my accidental totems. So many
varieties. I might slather

my arm in marshmallows, burrow
deep into the Southern earth. I'd gotten

the tattoo at nineteen, drunk, after Alicia and I
sneaked into the Jefferson—the fanciest

hotel in Richmond with its old
Deco fountain in the lobby

where pet alligators swam circles
through the Jazz Age. We sat on velveteen

love seats wearing ripped jeans among the suits
of Virginia politicians and Baptist preachers,

daring each other: I'll get a tattoo
if you do. We discussed passion

vines on biceps or matching dragonflies
winging our asses. I swirled my plastic

flask's bourbon, decided we'd make
a statement about consumerism—blue

barcode stamped on each of our forearms.
After the hotel manager kicked us out

for vagrancy I tore a page from a book
of grocery-store coupons so the tattoo artist

would have an image to copy: a barcode's
exact marks. I didn't think to stop

and choose which vegetable,
which object, didn't know my body

would soften beneath the lines. Ten years
later I'd finally ask a woman

to scan the ink, wondering why
I'd waited this long to find out

I've always been sweet but slightly
twisted, I've always been

waiting to disappear like this,
bite by bite, into someone's mouth.
...

No one notices my wings—folded, hollow-
boned. Across the room a girl slurps
red sauce from her fingers, and I fill
with the scent. Its thick molasses
marrows up my carpus, my
metacarpus. This is

why I come here. To remind myself
I was once alive. To weigh myself down,
down to the wishbone that almost
breaks when I remember
how the world tasted—summer rain
on my neck that rolled off,
off like the hour. Or the old house
with its broom closet door—the oak grain
pencil-marked with girl-heights. Once
my sister and I were small enough

to slow down time. We climbed
the cedars on each side of the yard. Scent
peeled from them in strips. Once we
crawled up the swing set's ladders and lay
across its top rungs at dusk. We watched
for long-eared bats, hoped to get bitten
by vampires and changed, until
the flank steak flamed and smoke
moved through the kitchen window,
until the voice

of our mother called us back. The rack
of ribs arrives at my table. I raise
its flesh to my mouth. I'm allowed this
bite before my wing-bones empty,
before I rise, red-lipped, a vinegar
sting in each corner of my mouth.
...

She spends the night with a man who once hunted deer,
who keeps squirrel meat

stacked in his deep freezer, the white ice
rising over red cubes like the animals'

fur as it returns. Cold night, she rolls closer to fit
the curve of his quilt-

slurred spine. She remembers
the patches' outlines: scattered houses snipped

from dead women's linen, those thin
A-frames. Better to snap

the neck of a shot deer than to wait for it
to slowly bleed. He believes this.

A sleepwalker, he often wakes
with a different woman's

head between his knees. He holds
her vertebrae in place as one hand

cups the jugular, the other seizes
the skull. He wakes to the dull warmth

of limbs kicking the sheets, to the scream
of a deer becoming a woman.
...