Jane Springer

I was born in a Tennessee sanatorium hours after my mother’s father died & I know how the womb becomes a salt-sea grave. I was born in the last seconds of small crops & small change rained down on the collection plate’s felt palate & I know the soul’s barn debt to past generations, too. Outside, ditchfuls of chicory flashed in the after-rain sun as melancholia’s purple scent rose & its steepled fog distilled in Tennessee hills. & I know I’m not supposed to be here on account of all those crazy aunts & I know great grandma was five when her Cherokee mother died & her daddy dumped her on the red clay curb of an Arkansas reservation then drove away in a wagon— how she just strode the fields of milkweed back to Tennessee & married her cousin. When I was five I drowned a fly in a piepan of water then spooned it out & heaped a hill of salt on its still body until I could hear a buzz again (as if within a belly) & I know the rush of the resurrected. I was born in the last decade of small town girls wearing white gloves to funerals. As an infant my boy quit suckling long enough to wave to my mother’s ghost— who used to drift in the doorway of the hours. & at three he told me at my age he had red hair & broke his neck falling off a runaway horse—I know the rocking chair’s set too close to the edge of the porch.

When they told us Don’t speak until spoken to, we grew ears the size of corn. When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed their hurt whole. When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted doors that opened behind curtains. For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to save us—not knowing how. & all the while we found love in unlikely places: In the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces, refracted in their long faces.