Genetic

1.
Ash-good-sharp-love

is the word for needle
the nurse says
in another client’s language

this is for genetic testing
she says

sign here

2.
when we were little
we went swimming swimming
every day

a pond with deep green algae
a garden spilled with weeds

Caravaggio would have seen
the shadows I
saw only heat waves, humidity

a dog panting
an overblown pink rose

my shirt a t-shirt
my skin red
peeling down to white

3.
Now we live outside
DC NYC LA

a set of initials
is not a home

when our parents died
we had them cremated

we burnt the old house
to the ground

then like the old cowboy
story—we got up on
our high horse

& rode the other way

4.
My daughter’s
school lets out

to crows chasing an owl
they are nothing to me—

loud caws
shit

unless they are ravens
they don’t belong in any poem

I have my standards

Miss Wisconsin, my daughter says,
reading the flyer, What do
you bet her hair is blond?

5.
Behind the reader at one book store—
self-help books

at this one—literary criticism

Is anything implied here?

6.
as the plane went down
the paper said

it was quiet as a library—
a library hushed
as a falling plane
how many have of us
have fallen?

so quietly—so far

7.
Yes I had a father,
I tell the nurse

no he’s not alive—
heart attack no history of cancer

A mother, dead too—
cancer

a sister—cancer—living still

grandfather, grandmother,
grandfather—cancer,
cancer, cancer

my father’s mother?
he always said
she swam away

Ash-good-sharp-love

she sticks the needle
in my vein

8.
What can you say about
your life in

so little space?

What will your daughter’s
daughter say?  

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, including the poetry collection Cinema Muto (SIU Press 2009), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award, and the poetry collection Dog Angel (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Her novel My Life as a Silent Movie is forthcoming from the Indiana University Press. She is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin.