Thanksgiving
Lisa Marie Oliver
after Traci Brimhall
Last night I left the dishes unwashed on the kitchen counter,
something I never do now that I'm a mother. I nest,
usually after everyone has gone to sleep when the late quiet
consumes the house. A friend told me she dreamt I was
standing in a field of showy milkweed, whorls leaking
the white sap that feeds butterflies. I don't tell her
their cells must be damaged before they nourish.
I planted milkweed after the news said it could save
the monarch's multigenerational migration to warmer climate.
Yesterday, a cold Thanksgiving, the guests arrived mid-day,
my toddler only ate the buttery Parker House rolls
with more butter and the fresh whipped cream but not
the pie. A guest brought meatloaf made from the elk
they hunted this season. She said before they caught him
he was frolicking on a grassy mountainside:
touched only by my husband and God Himself, the meat
sweet-savory with a hint of Dijon. Later, she told me she dreamt
I walked right into the ocean, spouted fins and gills.
A malformed merperson, I think. Mermother. Merwife.
She said it was my re-birth but I know better. I don't need
to be reborn, I need rest. I don't think there is rest under
the sea but I'm certain there is silence. At the table
we share what we're grateful for: family, friends, health.
I joke I'm thankful for the turkey but what I don't say
is that fetal cells pass through the placenta
into the tissues of the mother. I think, microchimera--
lion-head, goat-body, serpent-tail. I could say I'm thankful
for this cellular metamorphosis but there is an edge
in the rarely used dining room like the two knives
it takes to skin an animal, belly up for the first incision.
Nowadays, my act of defiance is to leave the dishes
crusting on the marmoleum counter and in the morning to pretend
they don't bother me. One time I did walk into the Pacific,
fully-clothed, mid-winter, stormy, the water only waist high
when I felt the current yank my legs away. Giddy with cold
and weightlessness I forced myself to wade in further.
Lisa Marie Oliver's poems are featured or forthcoming in Timberline Review, Book of Matches, Windfall and Literary Mama. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her wife and toddler.