CATHERINE ESPOSITO PRESCOTT

Reading to My Daughter About Rocks and Gemstones Before Bedtime

Her fingers press into a photo of sandstone—
terra cotta-striped mountains, sculpted vases.

She forces her fists together to mimic how sedimentary
rock become metamorphic, how pressure turns limestone

into marble. We learn that obsidian is smooth, pumice floats,
and some geodes sparkle like the flesh of a ripe peach.

We travel underground to find rock deposits
clinging to earth like clumps of melted ice pops,

or dull jewels from discarded Elizabethan-era necklaces.
We learn that a diamond is concentrated carbon

cooked in the earth’s mantle for at least one billion years.
Once mined, determined jewelers mar its surface

with hundreds of tiny cuts to make it sparkle.
She’s old enough to know gemstones have greater currency

than rocks, and looks to me for confirmation.
Which do you like, Mama? The world will ask her

to choose over and over again. Even at my age,
I’m asked daily about Botox and hair dye.

In our city, there are more emergency, anti-aging
clinics than urgent care centers. She rests the perch of my lap—

her first lookout. I cannot make these decisions for her.
I comb through her sun-streaked strawberry hair,

and try to answer every question eddying in the pools of her eyes—
You didn’t answer, she yawns. She wants firm answers, a world of absolutes.

Do you know who made the rocks?, she announces, God.
Do we believe in God?, she says turning the v into a b.

I was raised in a religion with many answers.
I was raised with self-abnegation, body as vessel,

body as original sin, a body made for birthing, for serving,
otherwise a thing to be distrusted, discarded.

Women were good or evil— and good was unattainable
for all but the saints, which meant the rest of us

were not good, or unworthy or undeserving,
which could also mean incomplete. I do not want

this for my daughter. When first born, babies see
black and white. Weeks later, colors separate— first ruby red,

last sapphire blue— but duality begins at birth. We believe
in possibility, I tell her. We believe we don’t know.

I ride the line between honesty and security. I close
the book and watch her eyelids flutter to sleep, witness

her mind travel to dreamscapes where time
and gravity have no hold, the light insider her

a dynamic prism, a form beyond any earth-
bound formation, thinning the veil between us.

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings and The Living Ruin. Recent poems appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Gone Lawn, Green Mountains Review Online, Flyway, MiPOesias, NELLE, Pleiades, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, as well as The Orison Anthology, and Grabbed: Writers Respond to Sexual Assault. Co-founder and editor in chief of SWWIM Every Day, Prescott teaches vinyasa yoga and yoga philosophy. She lives in Miami Beach with her family.