Click here to listen to Meghan O’Rourke read this poem.
I was born a bastard in an amphetamine spree, lit through with a mother’s quickenings,
and I burrowed into her, afraid she would not have me,
and she would not have me,
I dropped out down below the knees
of a rickrack halterdress,
sheeted, tented knees, water breaking, linoleum peeling,
and no one there to see but me,
I woke on the floor as if meant to
put her back together, to try to hold on to her
like a crate to a river, as if I’d been shipped down
to stand straight while in the misgiving
she said I had a dream of thirty-six sticks
floating down a river and a dog who couldn’t swim
and I could not swim, I slipped from her grip
in a room where two orange cats stared like tidy strangers
at a world of larger strangeness,
and I had no name. I was there at her breast
and I thought I could see her, the swag of her hair, the jaw, the fearing,
but I barely saw, I went sliding down the river
was never cool enough, the imprint of the bedded bodies
two geese diving at once.
