Charmaine’s Bath with No Windows Open

 

 

On this 98 degree day in July,

it takes us an hour and a half.  First off,

                                                                 

to lift her from toilet to shower chair.

The water’s too cold.  You’re burning me

 

to death.  I lather her scalp and each crevice

including under her one breast.

 

I wash twice between her toes.

Be sure you get between my toes.

 

I have towels at the ready for knees,

back, her thin blue feet.

 

I’m freezing. 

I don’t have any blood.

 

I dry between her toes.

Be sure you dry between my toes.

 

In the steamy bathroom,

me, Charmaine, and the GE hair dryer

 

Last I powder under both breasts,

one that’s there and one that isn’t.

 

 

 

U.S. Air Force Admits It May Have Bombed

Civilians in Afghanistan

 

                                                – for my adult children

 

To lose words, leak urine, gum bread,

to hobble on a stick,

 

ah, the finest of news.  So many years

without gunfire or flame.

 

Why do you stare, my lively ones?

I call this good news.

 

 

First I was pretty and then I was dead,

but in between, I got old.

 

No air force bomber came sprinkling fire

over my wedding.

 

My babies grew up with both of their hands

and all their skin.

 

It isn’t every day that every mother

gets such great news.

 

There is a woman whose face is darker

than mine.  Her shawl

 

shadows her eyes.  This woman was born

in the wrong village

 

under the wrong sky.  What must we do

to offer her baby                                                                      

 

each fresh sunrise like a rich peach

ready for patting

 

with two plump hands?

 

 

Whenever she shakes her head like that

 

 

the loose seeds rattle

like ends of a cracked filament

in a dead 60-watt bulb;

 

oceans slosh in her ears,

strands of hair splitting.

No, she shakes, no, no,

 

how nothing has come of nothing

and won’t.  Or hasn’t yet.

She longs

 

to laugh herself dizzy,

gasping for air.

Whenever she shakes her head like that,

 

her head falls off.

She holds it in folded arms,

eyes watching the ground,

 

as she tromps to the pumpkin patch

where she buries the head in mud.

Now don’t you know me?

 

Never you mind.

I am the wanderer.  The long

light-seeking vine.

 

 

 

Biopsy

 

 

Doctors inscribed my shoulder

with a purple X.

 

They tunneled into my left lung

to translate a spot.

 

They rummaged behind my clavicle

with their long needle.

 

            Breathe in. 

            Hold your breath. 

            Breathe out.

 

Thus did I diminish my lifetime larder

of air.  That night I couldn’t shrug.

 

If a sorcerer has spread seeds

on the altar of my breath,

 

are they growing?  Am I one more

cracked statue, or the dirt clod

 

clobbered under the great hoof

that draws the plow,

 

or else an untended field grown-in

with thistle?   Meanwhile

 

my foolish skin doesn’t know

we are waiting.

 

It goes on planning

to shelter me forever.

 

 

 

© Penelope Schott