CHLOE HANSON

The Body of the Mother

                           after Robert Hass

I do not want to write about my mother’s nipples,
or even consider that she has them,

twin markers of order mammalia like mine
leaving her cow-heavy and sore each month.

I know I should praise them,
les fontaines de jouvence,

and yet I imagine other fluids from her body flowing
into my mouth: blood, piss, pus.

(I once read that dairy milk has an allowable pus content,
overbred nipples scabbed from too much feeding.)

I do not want to think of my mother as Herrick’s Julia
a cherry double grac’d, strawberry half-drown’d in cream

to think of her bare before the man her mother
taught her to save herself for.

I do not want to consider her nipples like my own
to hear my husband ask if I think nipple size is hereditary,

to imagine my mother’s nipples like the shade of lipstick
we bought without realizing the other owned it.

I do not want to imagine my mother’s nipples
meaning my nipples recalled by a daughter of my own

who might have seen them once, accidentally,
coming to me cow-heavy and womb-hollow,

blood between her thighs
my own mother’s nipples pumped full of formaldehyde.

The Day Before

Tennessee brushfire - November 7th
I heard they suspect arson,
and I remain unsurprised.  
I have lived for months in the valley
of two blazing mountains.

That day I wrote it’s the first day of the year
to feel like Fall,
the smoke a wall, parting
to let me pass alone.

I noted the women who wore their college
student version of power
suits -- wide-legged  
polyblend pants and blazers, stickers
on their lapels:
I voted.

That day I wrote today is the last day
before we know what violence might
happen, how soon
the world might end.

So I went to class, studied
film criticism and The Pardoner’s Tale.
Around me, people in orange bought sodas
put up posters for a screening
of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  

What else could we do?
We, who wished to be important
and didn’t know how.