After “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith
Life is short, and I cannot keep this
from my children. Life ends with one breath,
and my children, though young, know too much
of endings. I have no baby blanket, soft
with the memory of their swaddled skin,
to pull over their eyelids. It was not me
who brought them here. My job is to open
my palms to theirs, to receive the half-
moon echoes of their fingernails
as we make our way through.
By night, their father and I try to stop
the hauntings. By day, he is in the back
office, reporting on babies bombed, on babies’
bodies left graveless. If that is too grotesque
for a poem it is too grotesque for this world.
I am bent over in the front yard, scooping stinking
flesh out of a cactus struck by a similar fate.
My children see the maggots come
crawling. The cactus has gone
the way of the world, half rotten,
and we in this house know it. The only way
forward I can fathom is to grind my knees
in the dirt, to try to save what still lives
by facing what has died. Any good Buddhist
will tell you our demons only bare
their teeth because they need
to be fed. On my best days I can make us
all believe it. I can make us all believers.
My children’s father in the back of the house, trying
not to weep, me on my knees
out front, supplicating. Between us, the living
room, with our children watching
the old dog tapping her toes around. Ears shorn
off from the cruelty of a life before this one,
she is dead set on finding a place to lie
in the sun. She refuses to rest anywhere but the light.
Annalise Parady is a poet, social worker, and pie baker. She currently resides in the Sonoran Desert in Phoenix, Arizona, but was born and raised in the wide open spaces of Wyoming. You can read her previous work in Corporeal Lit Mag. Annalise is always available to tell you a fun fact about the creatures and plants of the desert; you can find her on Instagram at @annalisewrites and on Substack at Third Place Poetry.