Showering My Son
BY MELISSA MCKINSTRY
First published in Beloit Poetry Journal
Now over one hundred pounds,
your soft body like the lead drape
a technician places before an x-ray.
Like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, white and pink—
sans all that hair, sans the sentience in the eyes.
Every day for almost twenty-four years,
my arms under your shoulder blades and knees,
I scoop you out of bed, pivot you
to the blue-mesh chaise on wheels.
Your three stomata—a constellation
from throat to belly to bladder. Oh, the way
plastic meets the flesh. Our little mystery,
our science experiment, our boy. Let us
wheel to the shower now. I’ll sluice warm
water over your chest, little tuft of hair.
I’ll lift each arm and rinse your musky
man odor. I’ll soap your groin, your legs,
and your rocker bottom feet with those
toes crossed for good luck. I’ll shampoo
your hair, a sort of translucence. I’ll shave
your chin, press a warm cloth gently
to each eye, the whorl of each ear,
the nape of your neck under the trach tie.
And then, the swaddle of towels,
the wheeling back to bed, and we’ll
become After the Bath by Degas—
the hairbrush and the awkward limbs.
I’ll lotion your knobby knees, thin shins,
each little finger that has never held
anything. I’ll fluff your pillow,
cover you with your soft old blanket,
read you a poem. I’ll be Frank O’Hara,
made for the lunchtime ritual of the city,
made for kangaroos, aspirins, beachheads, and biers.
“These things are with us every day,” he says.
Made for the daily touch, for the reminder—
“You really are beautiful!” he says.
Late Spring Epiphany After the Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibit
BY MELISSA MCKINSTRY
I’m always trying to paint that door—
I never quite get it,
she said of the black square
at her winter house in Abiquiú,
always a shadow shifting,
a ladder leading to sky.
When she looked through
a pelvic bone she picked up
in the desert, she saw
a ghost moon,
and today I’m quiet
as her bones and stones
and black pearl oyster shells.
Once I had a son. Once,
when he was four,
before his tracheotomy,
we were invited to float
in a warm therapy pool.
He was weightless
as I swirled his thin limbs
in slow circles and lines.
He seemed to sleep
through it all, but I loved it:
his buoyancy, absence of straps
and wheels. Water flicker
on his curly lashes,
maybe a quiver of smile.
He couldn’t say more,
or mmmmm, or get me out of here,
so I don’t really know.
I never really knew him.
He kept himself to himself,
maybe grew very small
to survive. He was a dark door,
a box of bones—
a soft, gone tabernacle.
