University of Northern Iowa

HomeAuthor(s): Kate EvansSource: The North American Review, Vol. 289, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2004), p. 38Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25127274 .

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N A R

JANE SASSER

Fecundity

How strange, this use of fruit:

cysts the size of lemons,

oranges, grapefruit,

the pear-shaped uterus,

the pregnant woman

who appears to have swallowed

a watermelon.

It was the size of a grapefruit, the doctor told my mother. Your troubles are over.

We took everything out.

When endometriosis claimed

my ovary and tube,

spreading like a bean plant gone wildly awry,

my doctor too wanted

to take it all out.

But I hung on

to this teeming landscape,

wanting to think of my body still

like a jungle rich with mangoes, like an autumn orchard bowed

with acres of Eve's apples.

The poem above originally appeared in our

May-August issue, with errors. We reprint it here, corrected, and offer

our apologies to Jane Sasser.

MARY ALEXANDRA AGNER

Whispering Me from Blood to Air

If I could move in between

atoms, slide from a colored grain

of sand to the scent of honeysuckle, wind myself like the purple

ivy trellised around your bones within the twelve layers of epidermal cells that keep out

the rain, or peek out freckles

tossed on like Pollock's paint, I wouldn't need to wait for your lashes to crest,

uncovering two pools I see

only when the tide has gone. I would be whispered from your blood to air,

open as a four-winged clover

and the Montana sky

storming between your cells.

KATE EVANS

Home

In the lemon poppy-seed molding of the ceramic kitchen. In the folding of the chrome dinette photo album. In the sewing box of freckled mums,

/vased. Cradled in the claw-foot hum

of cooking smells, of the window pum meled with afternoon light. Line of neck

wet with pillow sweat. Roof-lined flecked

by the candor of splayed elephant trees, furred trunks touched by sky, lattice leaves.

House shadowed, dug under by dandelion

rootery, twisted proboscis of worm. Eons

of needlework, veins, shoehorn squeak,

of rake, of feather duster trace. Eke

out the primeval smell of cellar. Webbed

attic, leafed roof, skin-ferment of bed.

8 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW November-December 2004

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