Dear Yashodhara,
I, too, make do without fathers. Take full fat
in my chai. Never stop to ponder the meaning
of duality, having lived with a person inside me.
Before he was a god he lay naked in a charnel ground
contemplating existence. He sat beneath a spreading tree
where Mara’s daughters danced for him, breasts
with the sheen of new apples, while you were home
changing diapers, wiping milky spit from the furniture,
pulling your striped flesh from a damp bra,
your fluid body a meal.
We both know enlightenment
is when the child screams all night and we don’t leave her
for the crows to pick over. We saunter and jostle
up and down halls, strap her in a car seat and drive
blocks around blocks, guilt about our carbon footprint
rubbing against the last collapsing nerve.
Beneath the lantern of the mind is the mud
of these bodies, able to conceive what the mind cannot.
I lift my daughter to the saddle of a carousel horse,
watch her ride the spinning prayer wheel,
pray it carries her away
from the curse of too much light.
Stella Reed is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019). She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. Stella teaches poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. You can find her work in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, and anthologized in They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018).