Ritual of Forbearance

Undone
(on cleft palate surgery)

With black ashes in her mouth
a woman sits in the confessional
rocking, holding her son
his mouth burnt, broken bread.

She pulls his tongue,
a molded salad of cherry gelatin,
by its black fishing-line thread
and wipes her shoulder
where his swollen, seeping head lay,
spilling, staining pulpy red juice.

Under the heat of tight-fisted bulbs
she collapses
like a fence on blackened grasses
and crawls away from the yellow
coyote-eyes of complicity.

Passing each aisle,
sterile chemical rooms,
her flesh scrapes the bark of wood pews
holding the glass jars and vials
of cotton gauzes, tongue depressors, salves, and syrups.

She begs a lustrating,
craves the acquittal
which she begins to receive
in the shift of the breeze
as a cool, carded-wool

taken from a stack of cleansed white cloth
dipped in a ewer of water
pressed against her forehead,
the sleeping baby gently placed to the wood cradle.

GL, 10/18/2009. Prevail.