Touch
From our family bones make marsh-duff
soil, salt, a kingdom of seedling, stalk—
Drinking purple dawn, we wade in the strange
autumnal songs, swallow sunshine, sweet corn
skin, raze the lawn, rub pollen from our sleeves,
weave dandelion & puzzle-grass & when
night falls we wait for the raccoons,
their noses so close we almost touch—
The woods burn & we rearrange our plots
of marl & clean & drink & hope that some eye
in the sky sifts what we have made from time
& lifts one silken brow before the thunder
returns. From our bones, make tide pools,
blood moons, O of a newborn’s lips—
You Did not Begin With Me
As ash after rain
becomes shelter,
a bird-bath’s hollow,
the shape of a womb;
as dirt becomes humus,
vine, vineyard, pew
of scents, incense,
myth, you did not
begin with me.
You grew
your own heart
as the wind
carves time
into bark,
& blows
new seedlings,
surprise
in the palms
of starved
gardeners—
To cultivate things
unknowingly is easy:
sweat, scars,
ruminations,
faith as overgrown
& golden
as dandelion
crowns, which I
picked from
the lawn
heading into
the hospital
on the day
you were born.
O Has a Mouth
My grandmother loved to roam the forests of her mobile home & drink
the air. When she died, I searched for her everywhere: in the space between
notes of a song, in the caesura, & the dusk, in the wind under an owl’s
wing, how it wheels toward the kill— With one word or look she could
calm me. If she had to, she could drown me with her hands.
Whole-body terror: wave after wave that wrecks, reshapes
whatever it touches— I am remade better: time-capsule: filled & filling.
Beside my son’s bed, the conch, its roar tells the same story:
from its burrow, a snake whirls inside a fish’s mouth,
then winds inside the winding intestines of a shark, around
whose throat is wound a shining wire— Heartflesh sold on a platter. We eat
to remember. How the earth swallowed her whole, will swallow us all,
gleaming mouth of dirt & stone closing our throats. When my son
was born he seemed too meek to resemble her, but when we heard
his violent, desperate cry, we knew— She did not stay in the ground for long.

Barbara Schwartz is the author of three books of poetry, a chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017) the collaborative collection Nothing But Light with poet, Krista J.H. Leahy (Circling Rivers, 2022), and the hybrid memoir, What Survives is the Fire, forthcoming from Alternating Current Press in 2024. A finalist for the 1913 Poetry Prize, Barrow Street Book Prize, and Alice James Award, What Survives is the Fire was adapted for the stage and selected for Boomerang Theater’s First Flight New Play Festival in 2018. Barbara has chronic myeloid leukemia and is an advocate for children with disabilities. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.
Image: Ryan Hodnett, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons