Lining

Everything breaks down — the esophageal tube 
whose pains mimic heartburn, the skin-skimming ersatz silk  
through which fingernails poke deeper and deeper holes. 

Maybe the clothes are poisoned through contact  
with melancholy’s salts. Maybe the fate of interstices is simply to dry up. 

Some days the body verily turns inside out 
as if dissociated or lacking elemental shame;  
brokenly we are learning not to see the scars and veins. 

Loss, of course, has its own domain. My mother’s autumn coat  
needs mending if she’s to wear it in the underworld. 

I choose a blush pongee. She thought herself unbeautiful 
in anything but black but look, I say, only you and I will see this apricot. 
And the land the others crossed to reach the ship? 

In the lining, folded documents of blood and birth. She believed in the idea 
of America despite the microaggressions, lesser crimes. 

In the hospital, they give her too much drip so she sleeps eleven suns 
chest flattened, only the ridged cheekbones jutting out; 
beside her, I go slack as a cat falling down a chute. 

The body comes unbaptized, the soul for a time resists these spectral bones. 
I pin cloth to her shadow, set the needle back into a dull groove. 

CAROL ALEXANDER

Carol Alexander’s recent collections are Fever and Bone and Environments (Dos Madres Press, 2021). Work appears in The American Journal of Poetry, The Common, Denver Quarterly, Ruminate, Southern Humanities Review, Stonecoast Review, Terrain.org, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. She co-edited Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022).