The Pillows

The Pillows
                                    by Molly Tenenbaum

The pillows, they breathe out and in, bedroom air
of fly-wing, bedroom air of gnat leg, flea dirt.Take them in, the little tickles, pour them out, a speckled song.

Mom’s hair and skin, scribbles and flakes, cocklebur
through the white case to the thin inner cover, foxtail
even through that to the foam—

my mother’s wisps, her grease-dust, her drawing brows,
her startled Oh!, her pine-motes, her white pith,
her parchment, her maple-wings,
her thousand hummingbirds in a thousand flowers
hammocking down in the pillow’s sling
like blood when the heart stops, one dead on her back
purpling downward—

Or at the bottom of the birdhouse, a titmouse makes her nest.

Or gravity gathers them to the middle, the bits of my mother,
a small heart in foam.

Or like the fifty trillion neutrinos that pass through the body
every second, her cells through the sheet, mattress, floorboards,
her cells through the crawlspace and possums.

Her cut-up pins, her finger-cups like peeled candle-wax,
the pillow’s cross-section a pencil sketch, Studies in Seeds,
pods whole, pods from the top and each side,
and pods burst, shooting fuzz-spangled dots.

Open-weave body, singing body.

Someone should lift me and squint at me, give a fluff
and plop me, fat drop, my head
in the dent and air swirling up till I sleep there,
my sighs and flutters, my whiffles and trills.

from Fire on Her Tongue: An E-Book of Contemporary Women’s Poetry (Two Sylvias Press, 2012)