Two Poems
Rachel Dreams of Children
And Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah,
and the name of the younger was Rachel.
-Genesis 29:16
A drop of blood in the river fades,
red dusk falling beyond the water.
Remember how the moon threw silver
at our tongues? I loved you for the way
you cared for speckled things: our dappled
valley, goats spotted like a poplar’s
bole, woolly clouds hanging out of reach.
You didn’t know then, what it meant:
you are my bone and my flesh,
you didn’t know how blessings weigh
heavy like a stone on the mouth of a well.
I dream my sister feeds my children
to the silver tongue of the milky way.
Remember how seven years passed
like just a few days in the valley?
I thought we’d conquered time.
When God remembers me, my blood
thickens. My sister names her children
for loneliness. I loved you the way
you loved speckled things: a ewe’s fur
streaked black and white, her call
freckling the chorus of insects mating
at dusk. When I dream through
my sister’s eyes, the valley fills
with children, and I am vanished
into a night as dark as bone
char. God’s memory kicks me
in my side: a knot of blood tightening.
I name my children for this.
Mirabelle Fly Trap
I.
Dew had glossed the garden green,
our work boots shining like wet tar.
I showed you how to pinch and twist above
the vine to preserve the cluster of currants
waiting for us like arachnids’ eyes.
As we worked, we laughed at the horses,
prim in their gray bonnets and coats, at the goats
wobbling on overturned buckets. Mirabelles
had been falling all around us that summer,
ripe stone fruits twisting free of their stems
and rolling onto the grass. Mirabelles scattered
on the wet lawn like forgotten golf balls.
II.
The windfall mirabelles glared up at us;
flies crowding above them, sweet
on bruised fruit and the syrupy stains
on our boots. Reaching for a thick branch
of berries hidden in the leafy shade, I grazed
the web of a wasp spider the size of my palm,
its black and yellow belly unmoving. We left
those berries to the spider that morning,
moved to sparser shrubs on the other side of the farm.
Mirabelles burst beneath our shoes as we walked,
releasing the sugars that bring the flies that bring
the spiders to the garden. Do you believe in god?
you asked, squeezing a stinging nettle’s spine
from my thumb. I was afraid something bad
might happen if I said no. Nettle sting
and currant juice, the day flushed us purple.
We brought the berries inside. Behind you,
in the east window, alpenglow over the Jura.
Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She currently lives in Las Vegas, where she is an MFA candidate at UNLV. Her work has recently appeared in The Emerson Review, trampset, jmww, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.
