The Gap
I can’t name it—
dark absence shadow—whatever,
a sound between your mother’s heartbeat—
that motor of love carrying what moves you toward
the day she’ll be gone, her smell of musk
and basil become yearning—
and silence like that between one lover and the next
when you wake at night to feel what isn’t
under the sheets with you—and sometimes
what isn’t takes your touch
between one leg and the other, back to a place
you can slide your fingers into—
that cavity like the space
from which you came: you know
the explanation, but it makes no sense,
journey of egg to sperm to produce a you
who sprouts like a grape on that umbilical vine
till the day of harvest when that ripe infant falls into
what isn’t there
between what you don’t remember and being
you who grew as fruit from your mother’s parts
and emerged as that membranous someone,
between the absence of her and you:
you squalled at the suddenness
of separation, and you will squall again, tears ferocious
as waters in the swirl of that hurricane
taking her, not you, into the gap
you long to fill with light and love
in its purest form you have known only
from the one who goes ahead into what
you cannot know until you enter it.
Big-Beaked White Birds
My clever dentist has me looking out the window
to see swallows or geese, osprey—or
wild pelicans, even—on the pond
before he leans me back,
hot neck wrap, light chatter
with the girl who congratulates me
on my selection from her menu:
bluegrass at 7 am to keep us all
chipper.
“Those pelicans
don’t come too often,” he says,
and she, “Aren’t they the ones with big beaks?”
He nods, propping my jaw open
and passing little tools,
stuffing and unstuffing my lips with cotton.
“Those pelicans are all over Moses Lake.”
I think of the Biblical baby in the bulrushes,
little dark Egyptian surrounded
by big-beaked white birds
looking down on him, wondering
if he’s edible, before Miriam swoops down
for the rescue: in my mouth, they’re closing in
as the ceremony progresses,
and something dark flies over the pond
beyond the flat TV where a pretty blonde
details disaster (cop shoots
black man again), and I close my eyes behind the glasses
that shield me, thinking
pelican pelican pelican as the dentist wiggles
my cheek and moves the needle
so I don’t even see the point of it.
Dear God
Art Thou present even as
our intestinal walls contract—
living within the bloated belly,
the rashy skin, the pigeon toes?
We look for Thee in the sublime,
but what if Thy beauty is inside
the transubstantiation—rotting
vegetation, steaming excrement piled
by the roadside, bloody exit
of liquid life to feed the big cat
tearing at the flesh of lesser things?
Art Thou in the movement
of water splitting the rock
obliterating hillsides, houses,
the little girl who, breathing mud,
then becomes the muddy thing?
Dost Thou flare in the gaseous neon
on that sign over the strip of spilled trash and those
hungry for needles—taking up residence
in putrid feet, stew of maggots
in diabetic flesh, whatever
takes us down until the skull is
picked clean, bellies of vultures
filled with what was, whilst the winged
Thou flyeth forth to take up
the next transitioning thing?
Lisa Norris’s book Women Who Sleep With Animals won the 2010 Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) Fiction Prize and was published by SFASU Press. Toy Guns: Stories won the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize and was published by Helicon Nine Press. Poems, stories, and essays have appeared in literary magazines including Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Fourth Genre, Terrain.org, Ascent, and others. She taught at Virginia Tech for 15 years and now is a professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.
Read a story by Lisa Norris also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Picography, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Lisa Norris by Pat Stotler.
