LISA MARIE OLIVER

Snow

for N.

I recite the Lord's prayer one-hundred times
            the night I flee, my child asleep in the backseat,
fulminant snowflakes, body fighting what will later 
be diagnosed as pneumonia. How the sky

seems to empty its snow-choked throat
with five miles to go to safety.
Safety being a friend’s double-wide on the mountain 
where she waits, making tea. 

Five miles to go when the blizzard belts the fields
flat and empty with blue light, 
the road a slit of ice. You can leave one danger
for another. Listen, maybe someday you’ll need

to flee during a snowstorm, lungs the ice-cracked
branches fallen at roadside, your child’s 
eyelids pale-pink with sleep. You may have once 
told yourself you’d never pray again 

but the recitation fills the space in the car,
in your chest, into the abandoned farm-fields, 
out into a night shut with cold. 
When you wake in the morning, you’ll open your eyes 

to a frost-lit window, watch your friend feed
            her twelve sows in two feet of snow.
The grunts and peals of their hunger 
like bells of benediction. 

At the awful seaside aquarium, I think about the polyvagal theory

“Immobilisation is the critical point 

of the experience of life-threat trauma events.”  - Dr. Stephen Porges

The giant octopus studies me with anemone eye,
where dorsal branch of vagus nerve 

freezes or faints, sea stench,
squeezed into an open-air trough. 

No fight, trapped beast 
of heart or mollusc, muscles stilled, 

uncalm as reef-rock. Both of us
coral exoskeletons, rooted sea-mounts, 

once single-minded swimmers 
hooked in a room of caved tanks

where nothing disquiets, not even
larynxes of pipefish, a thousand floaters.

If I can take one breath, I’ll carry
nine brainstems to where its sea-cold

and innervated. I’ll carry the bulbous body 
in my scarred body 

to the intertidal, contortionism a camouflage 
into each other, 

appendages tangled, sinking,
photospheres lit like bright plankton.

Lisa Marie Oliver lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Recent poems are featured or forthcoming in West Trestle Review, SWWIM, and The Night Heron Barks.