Unexpected
​
​
They wheeled my mother 
 
         to the table under the lights,
                   
                   sliced her open only to find
 
in her womb,
 
         a furled girl
 
                   the size of a damson 
 
plum, translucent eyelids
 
         too fragile to block 
 
                   the blinding white. 
 
The doctors pinched 
         
         my mother’s flaps of skin

                  ​together, stitched a hasty row
 
of x’s, washed their hands
 
         of it all, left 
 
                   me to swirl
 
in the murky sac, 
 
         heartbeat as faint
 
                   as a foxglove’s bell.


Previously in The Examined Life Journal

LINKS to ONLINE POEMS

"To My Parents"
The Shore
Issue 5: Spring 2020

"Musician's Focal Dystonia"
JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association
May 16, 2017

"Bodies Revealed Exhibition"
Intima
May 2017

"Pockets" and "Bones"
Sheila-Na-Gig
March 2020
​
"Two-Way Mirror"
West Texas Literary Review 2018

"What to Do About Winter (Broadside: art by Katie Nealis)
The Michigan Poet

"To the Story Girl" 
Dunes Review 2017

"Duet"
Dunes Review 2017

Link to Interview with Joanna White
Brilliant Books in  conjunction with Dunes Review
​
What the Hummingbirds Seek

We forked left along the river, hiked
to a wooden bridge. Up the arc, we drummed

the boards with brown-caked shoes, crossed over
to a place I must have been before; we came

into the scent of bees. You can't smell bees,
you said, but I was sure; sweet hugged us

like a fog. Vines twisted up through slatted fences,
teemed with spikey trumpets, cream

and apricot, honeysuckle throbbing.
I reached up to pluck a flower, pinched

the bud from the narrow end. Taste it, I said,
drawing out the wiry style, globe of nectar

dotting the i––
touched it to your tongue.

​
Previously in The MacGuffin