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Such a woman is the infected carrier of
the past-before her the structure of our
head and jaws ache-we/eel that we could
eat her, she who is eaten death returning,
far only then do we put our face close ta
the blood on the lips of our forefathers.
-Djuna Barnes
When I was a little girl, my mama drilled me with her own personal catechism for survival. She said, "These are some things you will learn. Love," she said, "it's a balled-up fist you hit yourself with, but you like it that way 'cause the beauty of contusions is that they disappear." She said, "Money, the need of it, the want of its breathe-easiness, can kill a man sure as a loaded gun held to the head. And God? God's a shrimp of a word with a big meaning, bigger than our brains can cipher. He keeps to himself. It ain't his place to say. Some days he looks like your daddy. Some days he looks like dirt. No one can look him straight in the face without burning his eyes out his head. He's got to let you bleed-he don't like it, but he's got to-lest you not learn how lovely it is having blood to let." She said, "The sunll set you on fire any chance it gets. The moon grows full like a woman, but don't be deceived. It won't help you empty yourself."
The moon was swollen the night my mama had me. She stared out the car window at it as my father drove her to Bethany Hospital. She said it was too full, looked like it needed to be lanced, drained of light.
When the nurse offered me to her, she wouldn't hold me. She turned away from my seceded body, still glassy and slick with placenta. She said she saw sorrow, clear as illuminated thread, woven into the tight shawl of skin that wrapped me, Wednesday's woeful child.
That night she hemorrhaged hard, blood rampaging out of her, fleeing the body it had buoyed. Mama told me one doctor said had she lost even another teaspoonful she'd have been "strumming a harp and waving to us from the beyond." He said that. A doctor. A man who rubs...