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HomeAuthor(s): Kate EvansSource: The North American Review, Vol. 289, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2004), p. 38Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25127274 .
Accessed: 17/06/2014 17:30
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N A R
JANE SASSER
Fecundity
How strange, this use of fruit:
cysts the size of lemons,
oranges, grapefruit,
the pear-shaped uterus,
the pregnant woman
who appears to have swallowed
a watermelon.
It was the size of a grapefruit, the doctor told my mother. Your troubles are over.
We took everything out.
When endometriosis claimed
my ovary and tube,
spreading like a bean plant gone wildly awry,
my doctor too wanted
to take it all out.
But I hung on
to this teeming landscape,
wanting to think of my body still
like a jungle rich with mangoes, like an autumn orchard bowed
with acres of Eve's apples.
The poem above originally appeared in our
May-August issue, with errors. We reprint it here, corrected, and offer
our apologies to Jane Sasser.
MARY ALEXANDRA AGNER
Whispering Me from Blood to Air
If I could move in between
atoms, slide from a colored grain
of sand to the scent of honeysuckle, wind myself like the purple
ivy trellised around your bones within the twelve layers of epidermal cells that keep out
the rain, or peek out freckles
tossed on like Pollock's paint, I wouldn't need to wait for your lashes to crest,
uncovering two pools I see
only when the tide has gone. I would be whispered from your blood to air,
open as a four-winged clover
and the Montana sky
storming between your cells.
KATE EVANS
Home
In the lemon poppy-seed molding of the ceramic kitchen. In the folding of the chrome dinette photo album. In the sewing box of freckled mums,
/vased. Cradled in the claw-foot hum
of cooking smells, of the window pum meled with afternoon light. Line of neck
wet with pillow sweat. Roof-lined flecked
by the candor of splayed elephant trees, furred trunks touched by sky, lattice leaves.
House shadowed, dug under by dandelion
rootery, twisted proboscis of worm. Eons
of needlework, veins, shoehorn squeak,
of rake, of feather duster trace. Eke
out the primeval smell of cellar. Webbed
attic, leafed roof, skin-ferment of bed.
8 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW November-December 2004
This content downloaded from 195.78.108.40 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 17:30:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions