Reed, who’s got one strike left before he gets
life, tells me afterbirth is what the cougars are after.
“Lambing season,” he says, “plus, placenta’s a delicacy
to a cat.” I try to explain how intent they were,
how their intentions appeared
to involve me, but Reed won’t hear
a word. My mother takes me at my word & won’t
let me leave the house. So I learn
to regret my story, sit indoors
for weeks, watching for hunters, only to find
what’s hunted: the gray diggers interring green
walnuts at the feet of the tree they fall from. Now
all I can think of is blood, how we first feed
on it without knowing we feed on it
or that it possesses a plan all its own. Every girl
I know has started, nicknamed it
Florence or Flo or The Red Badge
of Courage. It’ll be years for me. When a doctor
finally says, “you’ve fallen so far
off the growth chart, I’m worried
you won’t find your way back,”
I’m fourteen & can still go out
shirtless without causing a stir. “Eat more
butter,” he says, but I don’t
yet believe what I eat will help me hate
my body any less. Reed doesn’t hate
his kids. He loves them
too much is the story. People tell me
to avoid him, but I don’t. His flocks graze the fields I drag
my shadow over & I have nothing better
to do than gaze at interminable
feeding, mumbling Exodus
under my breath, some passage
about bearing false witness. & I think I know
by now that knowing involves the senses turning a touch
licentious. My parents haven’t known each other
in years & no one wants to know me either. A tree falls
in the woods. Con- sensus leaves us cold, etc. Green
Eggs and Ham, I really dislike that kid’s book, with all
its I-would-nots & could-nots on boats & in woods,
all its reds & its greens inter- mingled, muck of inks
you should never swallow. A doctor hands me
a copy, says, “Go, enjoy” & pulls a plastic curtain
between us. I’m three & can’t yet read any word on my own
but “God.” He reaches his hand, gloved
green, inside my mother & says,
“what about this weather we are
having?” Just between
us, I warn the story’s star not to touch
its plate, but in the end it’ll do what the good Dr. has
scripted. I throw the book. My mother stops
singing beneath a stream of steaming
water, a red-black mass dehiscing
at her feet. “Find
your father,” she commands, so I run
through yellow meadows, yelling his name, his name,
which the hills give back to me, though he can’t
hear them from the other side of this state. On the other
side of this state, my mother finds her first horse.
It is 1980, decade of the single-wide & no-
children-in-the- picture. Just a mare called Chianti
who dies one year before I’m born. Her heart,
size of a child’s globe, fails while foaling,
something involving a decayed length of intestine & great
pain. My parents take great pains to save
her, but the foal will lose
his mother the instant the air enters his chest.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, “I” can be rendered
as a single reed & “meadow” as a row of three
reeds bound by a flatline of horizon. I know little,
even now, though enough to say my name & know it’s not
mine, but just some inadvertent testament
to my mother’s love of horses & good
breeding. In an ancient Seventeen
Magazine, an English girl of means
straddles a dappled pure- bred bearing my name.
Seventeen, the age I am when my interior starts giving up
the way it’s meant to, with blood, & thanks
only to pregnant mares held captive, their urine stolen
for the green tablets I’m made
to swallow. & though I feel
like a martyr outgrowing martyrdom when it happens,
a sacrifice of sorts still takes place inside me. I
am the first to admit I’m kind of a poser sometimes, like when
I convince my friend Ann I’ve started,
when in fact, I’ve only lifted
my mother’s lipstick to tint my underpants the right
shade of red. Sure, I’ve begun to forget my mother’s
writing as it appears in Arabian Horse World, some piece
on giving birth & up & tricking a strange
mare into caring for a foal
not hers by painting it up, by daubing
it down, in the afterbirth of her still-
born. What more could one ask for?
My mother once rubbed moonshine on my gums to numb the pain
appearing inside me. Moonshine, the name given the foal
dressed in after- birth & therefore breathing.
Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath, selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Sally Keith. A graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has published work in The Nation, POETRY, Poets & Writers, the American Poetry Review, Lana Turner, The Harvard Advocate, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Devon is the recipient of the New England Review’s Emerging Writer Award, the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Lucille Medwick Award, and the Jill Davis Fellowship at NYU, where she currently teaches undergraduate creative writing courses.
Credit: From Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Devon Walker-Figueroa. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org
Devon Walker-Figueroa’s latest book is Philomath. Visit with her and her work at the Miami Book Fair 2021.
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2021! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 25 through November 12 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 14 and November 21, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2021.
