Ex-Votos for Alcoholism
BY GABRIELLA R. TALLMADGE
A long way through sallow hills to Fresno.
Burnt grass reminding me of piss,
then, naturally, jaundice.
Farmland hollowing but is memory
of water. I try not to look
at the carcasses.
But was that owl still dying?
It looked just struck and,
wings flailing, freshly
registering the damage. Or not.
Not an animal showing me
its leaving. A cream wing caught up
by the rush of passing trucks,
life having already evacuated.
Wing in lift because the air,
its hollowness, it must. Can’t
remember now where I was
before the owl—the passenger
in my head never looking in
my same direction.
Left are the ledger of miles
after this.
When I Was Astarte
BY GABRIELLA R. TALLMADGE
Holding this bowl beneath my breasts,
the fifteenth of lunar July grows fat
with moony desire. My milk is a miracle. I am sovereign. I wander
and take up with still-born stars. With this head of a bull
as my own, I underpin every galley post, every ibex,
the dusk in the sky, the under-life. The gates to hell
sing to appease me. They meant my name
to mean shame but rams grow wombs in my sight,
their fluted horns discarded. And way back,
at the first light, there was an egg on my knee.
From this egg broke twins. They swam past the cloudlets
and seeded this world. One never returned.
And so the living will wilt like petals.
All will scald between my lips, my vessel of annihilation.
But I will regrow those who die in battle, breech
birth, slaughter chutes. This is to become again, climb
back up my branches, taste
the sulfur of matches, reach out and graze
my freckles, field of capsized planets.