Feast by Carla Panciera

When she’s starving herself

When she lets her bones rise like the wreck of the Frances
at the convergence of minus tides, new moons,
after a winter of superstorms:

When you consider the thumb-sucking lap-sitter
she was – that angle only she will ever have of your face
from the underside of your jaw:

When you can’t think why she takes the meat
off this beautiful body, this body whose thighs
whose elbows earlobes –

………………..the soap-bubble-limbed, mosquito-scabbed
…………………………flesh of this sea monster baby:

When she talks the way she’s always talked
a teaspoonful by teaspoonful elocution
……….and she worries about missing algebra –

When you think: All this, too? All this and not
the necessary thing?
When you wonder how you did this to her,
and when she turns a song up so you can hear

think of the ways we wash ashore.

In Truro, for example, a shipwreck place
where Pamet Indians smoked tobacco in lobster claw pipes,
and Pilgrims, seasick, filthy, finally touched land.

This place of purse nets and mute swans, a world
where gods had to be appeased, not stationed
in a bed of peonies and painted every summer

……….like the Virgins of our childhood.
……….This place to raise a glass against sacrifice.

(You can’t help that she’s in you still, can’t imagine
the way she began, the spiraling vessels,
the blinking heart – that terrible miracle, that return guest)

……….Yes. Let’s set the table in Truro one day.
……….White-candle drip castles indelible on cloth.

When your rib-cage plays back the ghost of her alto –

Let’s find the first tomatoes of the season, a fingerbowl of seasalt.
Let us, if this is what the world asks of us, beg forgiveness.
But then let’s eat. Let’s use our hands.

Carla Panciera has published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize. Her work has appeared in several journals including Poetry, The New England Review, Nimrod, and Carolina Quarterly.