Writing 2

Ribbed Cages

Charity lives in Vermont and has no bones,
born a silken sack, carrying her name
in a skin diffuse as sunlight touching sand.

Her birth left her mother and the landscape relatively
unmarked. Post partum, steers continue chewing cuds
like old men, and mountains still bump the clouds like

winning athletes bumping chests. The townsfolk,
Vermont pines in their spines, have never seen her,
only heard tell of wheelbarrows of marrow imported

from Chester and closer. They sink, rigid ships,
in her garden. Petunias blush hemoglobin, marigolds
no longer move. Bones grow there—stone bones,

radish bones, wheat bones, and dogs have begun
to sprout. But Charity, toothless as a wave of starlight,
flows past the garden, streaming like the water

that weaned Noah’s ark from earth and drifted
continents. She surges deep as the Pacific,
beyond men and women in ribbed cages.

 —originally titled “Tight Cages,” published in Poetry Northwest