Phedras de Blondel
This History of Lungs
- There are twelve worries she does not know, but she carries them onto the plane, through the ocean’s bleak face.
- She is a ruby in the night before Halloween.
- Her throat is a restless pigeon in a king bed.
- When she gets an MRI, they have to cut her wedding ring off.
- She is a diary I am keeping.
- She is a painter of the bedroom ceiling, carpenter’s daughter, blood-sick nurse—menace in a pressed suit.
- A man threatens to bring his gun to the office with my mother in the barrel’s ink
- She works behind blue windows of wake, face to mouth to metal.
- In Thailand, she eats grasshoppers and calls my father when he wakes up.
- She buries cubes of butter into a baked potato and chews the skin.
- When I see my mother, I see her hands twisting into knuckle.
- She is a child of splinter, a history bruised blue by wine.
- In California, she sobs into the herb garden when she misses my phone call.
- She collapses as a bale of parched hay.
- The drought has taken her tongue.
Sara Ryan is a first-year poetry MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University and an associate editor of poetry for Passages North. Her poetry has been published in Boxcar Poetry Journal, Bear Review, Jai-Alai Magazine and various anthologies, and is also forthcoming from The Boiler Journal.