Pelvic bones are nothing like wings
or blades. I know because I saw them in a meadow
at Mount Diablo. They must have come from a mother cow,
birth canal a wide hollow. I touched
the wild rye that pulsed inside.
*
Once, in the desert, my mother
and I argued about the shape of the earth
until I wept. Wind chimes jangled in the garden.
I had sex, I told her. A hummingbird thrummed
its overtaxed heart to nectar. When she asked if
we’d used lubrication, my mouth wouldn’t form
that word for her, my first river: wet.
I blushed, thinking she meant pleasure.
*
Benzene and yellow pollen
—the black hose stretched
like an umbilical cord
as she spoke to me through
the car’s rolled-down window.
A gas station is no place
to be told your mother was raped,
but where would be better?
Inside of me, three clicks to close
securely, and the rest of the ride
devil cholla rooted in the desert,
its stars shaped from spines.
*
The holes drilled into cows’ abdomens
are called fistulas. A plastic ring holds
the flesh apart, fitted with a lid like a fuel
cap—twist to the left—so researchers
can insert their arms. A porthole
to the rumen. At the county fair
a man wearing an eat beef T-shirt
demonstrates: You can stick your hand in
as far as you’d like. He pulls, from the hole
in the cow, a clump of undigested grain.
*
I used to be unable to hear violation
without violet, trailing wisp
of elation—until the word
slipped its sonic skin like
grass to blade.
*
A healer tells my mother
she has a wall around her heart
made of red carnelian,
a stone used to ward
off the plague. In some people,
the wall is made of cinder blocks.
In others, Hello Kitty stickers.
Whatever they had on hand.
*
Last night, after he had cum,
I watched him stroke the leaves
of the monstera with his thumb.
Later, after a long walk home,
I touched myself, breathing
in the dark like the cows
in the Carruth poem I’ve never
known whether I hate or love.
*
Look at your hands, an old man instructs
me. They have done gentle things.
They have done ungentle things.
We sit on a lakeshore, strangers until
I told him I was searching for a way in
to a poem. Asbell, he says. His last name.
The ungentle thing I have done:
reaching inside of.
*
Like a blanket smoothed with both palms,
the earth is flat enough, she said, to lie down on.
Abigail McFee holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she was the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Poetry and the Theodore Roethke Prize. Her manuscript was a finalist for Milkweed Editions’ 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize. Abigail’s work appears in wildness and is forthcoming in Copper Nickel.
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