Stinging nettle mashed or dried, dandelion
leaves with their bitter milk—steep in tea,
add to salad, or prayer. In the waiting room,
all the women are pregnant, and I am
jealous. One moth clings to a lit
bulb, its feet burning with light,
tiny brain firing off with pleasure.
The prefix mis— originally meant
to change; now: ill, wrong, absence,
negation. As though change flows only
downstream, the direction of loss. My mother
describes field dressing a deer in detail: winding
through thick cords of intestine
like combing a daughter’s hair. The snow
dotted with birds, dark bodies against the white,
While my organs flash like abstract art
on the screen someone leans into the sky at the apex
of the world’s tallest building seventy-five
hundred miles away. Still, someone builds toward
heaven, as though they’ve learned
nothing. Still, we risk it—proliferation
of language, the collapse into confusion.
The technician with her mouth ajar
asking when I’ll meet with the doctor.
The other nurse in the room looking
worried, or just exhausted. Only one man died
building the Burj Khalifa—If we had known
in advance, the building would have been
built anyway. To call something an attempt
is to admit failure. In front of me, the uterus. A dark bean
on the ultrasound, set in the body’s center and cut
through by a crease of light—my vanishing point.
