I can see my mother’s soil brown
skin in her backyard garden—every year
she replants her placenta, my after-
birth, under lavender. She pushes
her long fingers beneath
the dirt like she makes
love with my father. Burying the brown,
dried mass that was once inside her, once
her body and mine equally, she pushes her
alive and dead bodies below
that backyard brown like she needs
to remember. She is thinking of my father
and the family that began in a marriage
bed that existed beyond them but inside
and around their bodies. What she
reburies is her heritage, dried
and wrinkled like the hands of her Omaha Indian
father; her placenta is her offspring and every year
it rises to the surface, gleaming, writhing for air
as it did inside her, just as her body’s heritage—
and offspring equally—rises and dips
with my father, aching for breath and something
deeper inside, something living that will feed them.
I do not think of this.
I cannot, could not start from that.
It is too simple. It is dry. And yet,
this ritual is within
me, I can feel it when I push myself
through another body. Each time it surfaces
in me I am reborn, and I bury, rebury
my mother’s placenta in the garden and
I come up for air.
I remember no beginning
By Britta Ameel
no pinpoint
moment of start
just breath
and two heated bodies,
adherents to the promise
of release, let-go,
under skyblue sky, desert.
Breathe, skin,
and pull, you need
that point of touch
between barebacked bodies
to feel and remember
your own presence
in the pulse of your blood.
Nothing understands
these movements
except my sense of touch
as if the rest were hollowed
out and these moments
move over my body’s surface
like sunlight, soldiers.
And the other body, it too
barely comprehends.
Like me, it moves and breathes
out of necessity, promise.
Those eyes, they are the nails
that catch and hold the second
I leave my skin.
The
City
By Britta Ameel
Pike
Street, midday Sunday in Seattle,
the rain continues through the sun
and umbrellas bob, even under the awnings
of
buildings with peeling names like “Pine House.”
In the fish market, names are engraved on the floor bricks,
some cracked at the middle initial, and you notice
the
things everyone notices: dried stattice flowers,
wax-like produce, melting ice under the fish with mouths
the size of bowling balls, prawns, rock cod, mussels,
cockles,
the sex shop across the street. There are foods
with names like piroshky, baklava, dim sum, crêpes,
and others with names you don’t recognize
If
this were a fast-forwarded movie scene,
we would not see the names on the bricks
or the faces of the buyers, but rather, the kiwis,
red-bellied
fish and the yellow jumpsuits of the workers
who throw salmon over the heads of tourists on buckets.
Perhaps we would see the hulking clouds shift
above
the market, as if the clatter of scales
weighing oysters and brown bags packaging produce
made them nervous. Later, under massive marble buildings
of
downtown, the shop signs are backlit for dramatic effect,
the clouds hang in the upper stories, and the windows,
even the walls, produce reflections of the walkers-by,
heading
for the last bus, hoping it is late.
You are the last stranger in this heavy city,
one of the many written on elevator doors
or
bathroom stalls, and what keeps you coming back
to the fruit, the layers of umbrellas, the boutique windows
and swooping gulls on the waterfront is this: when your cold hand,
out
of its pocket, meets the fingers of another ungloved hand,
when your eyes meet another pair in the glossy marble of a bank,
and there is the sudden feeling they might know your name,
the
smallest bolt of electricity travels up your spine.
This is when you know what it means to be a body
fourteen days into the twenty-first century.
What I Want You To Know
By Britta Ameel
This
morning I watched you,
sleeping so hard you did not move
when I pulled the blinds
in one quick motion
to let the sun fall over your back.
Moving fingers from the window
to your back, I let the drops of water fall
from my fingertips, each little sphere
rolling down your spine in uneven
starts and stops, catching
at each vertebrae, faster with your inhales,
leaving a shimmery trail, pooling
at the small of your back. I think of the ring
you made me, the thick, silver one,
and the way it fell from the box when I opened it,
bouncing on the tile and rolling
unevenly on the kitchen floor, the bump
of the soldered seam slowing it to a stop.
I
did not want to wake you this morning,
you fell asleep after me last night,
tired and languid from our fight.
So when you moved, I pulled
myself down next to you, pressing myself
against your back, the line of water
a seam between us.
It was not your continuous sleep
that surprised me, but that long,
slow exhale with which you flipped over
onto your other side, facing me,
and opened your eyes into mine
as if to keep me from watching you.
It
is this morning that I finally understand
why you usually wake before me—you are so
vulnerable in the morning,
and this is enough to wake you, enough
to keep you from admitting we are like
the irregular roll of the water down your spine,
enough to make you get out of bed and glide
into the cold, silver air of the coming day.