by Jane Shore
Her partner’s wavering hand
connects with her sequined wrist;
but his other hand misses, clamping
shut on the air that frames her,
no connection, her body blurring
its slurred speech, as scanning
the sawdust floor, the camera locates
the broken italic of her flesh.
No connection! I can’t remember
no matter how many times I see her,
no matter how many times
my father runs the film.
Projecting in reverse, he has her
climb the ladder of light
one more time, for my benefit,
but he can’t rescue her
from gravity forever.
Backward, she bullets up toward
the bull’s-eye of her partner’s fist,
her face enlarged in its unknowing—
and lands back on the platform,
squarely on her own two feet!
Spliced into the same reel, unreal
documents of the commonplace.
A picnic under way. Then it is Sunday.
The living room upholstery is brand new.
The Frigidaire is white-enamel white.
Then, a lucky break to catch this,
I am crawling, hoisting myself up
my mother’s skirts to take my first
steps, fighting to keep my balance,
staggering toward whatever it was
I reached for out of the camera frame—
held and lost in that drifting
instant of attention,
from which the body performs
its miraculous escape.
The Russian Doll
After Elder Olson
Six inches tall, the Russian doll
stands like a wooden bowling pin.
The red babushka on her painted head
melts into her shawl and scarlet
peasant dress, and spreading over that,
the creamy lacquer of her apron.
A hairline crack fractures the equator
of her copious belly,
that when twisted and pulled apart,
reveals a second doll inside,
exactly like her, but smaller,
with a blue babushka and matching dress.
An identical crack circles her middle.
Did Fabergé fashion a doll like her
for a czar’s daughter? Hers would be
more elaborate, of course, and not a toy—
emerald eyes, twenty-four-karat hair,
and with filigreed petticoats
like a chanterelle’s gills blown inside out.
An almost invisible fault line
would undermine her waist,
and a platinum button that springs her body open.
Now I have two dolls: mother and daughter.
Inside the daughter, a third doll is waiting.
She has the same face,
the same figure,
the same fault she can’t seem to correct.
Inside her solitary shell
where her duplicate selves are breathing,
she can’t be sure
whose heart is beating, whose ears
are hearing her own heart beat.
Each doll breaks into
a northern and a southern hemisphere.
I line them up in descending order,
careful to match each womb
with the proper head—a clean split,
for once, between the body and the mind.
A fourth head rises over the rim
of the third doll’s waist,
an egg cup in which her descendants grow
in concentric circles.
Until last, at last, the two littlest dolls,
too wobbly to stand upright,
are cradled in her cavity as if waiting to be born.
Like two dried beans, they rattle inside her,
twin faces painted in cruder detail,
bearing the family resemblance
and the same unmistakable design.
The line of succession stops here.
I can pluck them from her belly like a surgeon,
thus making the choice between fullness
and emptiness; the way our planet itself
is rooted in repetitions, formal reductions,
the whole and its fractions.
Generations of women emptying themselves
like one-celled animals; each reproducing,
apparently, without a mate.
I thought the first, the largest, doll
contained nothing but herself,
but I was wrong.
I assumed that she was young
because I could not read her face.
Is she the oldest in this matriarchy—
holding within her hollow each daughter’s
daughter? Or the youngest—
carrying the embryo of the old woman
she will become? Is she an onion
all the way through? Maybe,
like memory shedding its skin,
she remembers all the way back to when
her body broke open for the first time,
to the child of twelve who fits inside her still;
who has yet to discover that self,
always hidden, who grows and shrinks,
who multiplies and divides.
Anthony
Your absent name at roll call was more present
than you ever were, forever
on parole in the back of the class.
The first morning you were gone,
we practiced penmanship to keep our minds
off you. My fist
uncoiled chains of connecting circles,
oscilloscopic hills,
my carved-up desk as rippled as a washboard.
A train cut you in half in the Jersey marshes.
You played there after school.
I thought of you and felt afraid.
One awkward a multiplied into a fence
running across the page.
I copied out two rows of b’s.
The caboose of the last d ran smack against
the margin. Nobody even liked you!
My e’s and f’s traveled over the snowy landscape
on parallel tracks—faint blue guidelines
that kept our letters even.
The magician sawed his wife in half,
then passed his hand through the gulf of air
where her waist should be.
Divided into two boxes, she turned and smiled
and all her ten toes flexed.
I skipped a line.
I dotted the disconnected body of each i.
At the bottom of the page,
I wrote your name. And erased it.
Wrote it, and erased again.
Thumbelina
Thumbelina, poor sleeping child,
swaying in the hammock of a leaf,
nested in my left hand the whole
summer of my seventh year,
her skull just the size of my thumbnail,
her bird heart ticking against my pulse.
Only a child, I was an only child,
small for my age, but a giant
towering over a clump of crabgrass.
A belly button in the dirt,
the anthill was the slave plantation
I oversaw, ants laboring
in the fork-raked furrows,
hoisting heavy sacks of cotton—
crumbs twenty times their body weight.
To be a giant, you must learn to step
softly, carefully, so as not to hurt
the working earth.
That year in school I was learning
how to add. The backyard thundered
with my mother’s yelling. “Ssh.
Don’t wake the sleeping Thumbelina,”
I’d whisper into my
left hand.
“Don’t hurt the sleeping child,”
the shell of my left hand echoed.
At home I was learning to tell time.
Each night when I tried to sleep,
I heard the alarm clock’s jeweled
movement, seventeen diamond planets
on sawtooth wheels orbiting a ruby sun.
But something else was ticking
in another part of the Milky Way.
A cloud-spasm in the utter darkness,
something else was swimming into the galaxy.
Who could imagine anything as silly
as a child the size of a thumb,
a replica, a shrunken opposite,
a speck of sand that no amount
of wishing could dislodge.
Inside my mother’s body, a baby
as big as a lima bean
was growing. But the child I carried
with me, who slept the sleep
of a speechless animal,
I carried for my own protection.
I never raised a hand against my mother
because the hand can crush what it protects.
High Holy Days
It was hot. A size too large,
my wool winter suit scratched.
Indian summer flaring up through fall.
The shul’s broken window bled sunlight
on the congregation; the Red Sea
of carpet parted the women from the men.
Mother next to daughter, father next to son,
flipped through prayer books in unison
trying to keep the place. Across the aisle,
my father wore a borrowed prayer shawl.
A black yarmulke covered his bald spot.
The rabbi unlocked the ark
and slid the curtain open. Propped inside,
two scrolls of the Torah dressed like matching dolls,
each a king and a queen. Ribbons hung down
from their alabaster satin jackets;
each one wore two silver crowns.
I wondered, could the ancient kings
have been so small? So small,
and still have vanquished our enemies?
The cantor’s voice rose
like smoke over a sacrificial altar,
and lambs, we rose to echo the refrain.
Each time we sat down
my mother rearranged her skirt.
Each time we stood up
my head hurt from the heat, dizzy
from tripping over the alphabet’s
black spikes and lyres,
stick-figure battalions marching to defend
the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
Rocking on their heels, boats
anchored in the harbor of devotion,
the temple elders davened Kaddish, mourning the dead.
Our neighbor who owned the laundry down the street
covered his left wrist out of habit—
numbers indelible as those
he inked on my father’s shirt collars.
Once, I saw that whole arm disappear
into a tub of soapy shirts,
rainbowed, buoyant as the pastel clouds
in The Illustrated Children’s Bible,
where God’s enormous hand reached down
and stopped a heathen army in its tracks.
But on the white-hot desert of the page
I was reading, it was noon,
the marching letters swam, the regiments
wavered in the heat,
a red rain falling on their ranks.
I watched it fall one drop at a time.
I felt faint. And breathed out sharply,
my nose spattering blood across the page.
I watched it fall, and thought,
You are a Chosen One,
the child to lead your tribe.
I looked around the swaying room.
Why would God choose me
to lead this congregation of mostly strangers,
defend them against the broken windows,
the spray-painted writing on the walls?
Overhead, the everlasting light, a red bulb,
was burning. As if God held me in His fist,
I stumbled down the synagogue stairs
just in time to hear
a cyclone of breath twist through
the shofar, a battle cry so powerful
it blasted city walls to rubble.
I reeled home through the dazed traffic
of the business day—
past shoppers, past my school,
in session as usual,
spat like Jonah from the whale
back into the Jew-hating world.
The Game of Jackstraws
One at a time from the pile
each player in turn tries
to remove the jackstraws—
the miniature hoes, shovels,
ladders, pickaxes, rakes—
without moving any of the others.
Light as a bird bone,
the fragile sword fallen free
from your lucky scatter
is easily yours.
You may keep it and attempt
another. Using the tiny hook
or your fingers, you barely
touch a wrench when the hammer
below it stirs.
On your next turn, careful
as a paleontologist,
bones craning over bones,
you lift a pitchfork
cantilevered on a scythe
balanced on the flat blade
of an oar which rests
against the nervous edge
of the saw—one body
touching the body of another
which has touched another’s
body, and so on, that graveyard
of relations better left buried
and forgotten like the casual love