Marathon Training with Baba Yaga
I’m surviving,
but I shouldn’t.
I’m thinking of Baba Yaga’s
house on chicken legs as we run
sixteen miles in June. I’m jealous
of a house that mutates
like some charmed foulard of myth
to protect its living host. A mech suit
for a witch in her pot
of squandered broth —
what did she do
to deserve survival?
You want to shed me like snakeskin.
You wish I’d flake off, but I’m like
these horseflies chasing us in the rain.
Their serrated mandibles scissor our
skin open. Their tongues, spongiform,
plump as they fill. I read once only females
bite, so I don’t swat them away.
A blood tax feels only fair. Fools truck for less.
Look, I say, half a mile behind you, drink up!
I’m stuffing my body into illusion, into a phantom
friends-with-benefits disaster. Horsefly me,
unassailable, lured to disaster and roadkill.
Never mind the way “coward” slips from your mouth
into mine. Never mind you reading my texts
when I leave the room. Never mind the parade of
Did you sleep with hims and my dismissals like wet
confetti under truck tires.
I am stronger than you.
Stronger than your faith in karma. Stronger than
your belief in my comeuppance. Baba Yaga
folds and unfolds the cosmic Kleenex
of consequences, doling them out
in perfect time: you leave me
for your student. I leave home for a valley
of techbros. But before all that, this:
a stand of loblollies scorched in a control burn.
A rogue gator flicking its lazy tail
in a shallow of minnows. Warning flags
of sunlight staked into the mud.
My house, which is to say, my memory,
sprouting chicken legs ten feet tall, running headless,
fearless to the kindest axe blade she can find.
Mother Dirge
When my mother calls, where does my voice go?
Up my sinuses until it’s snot in a tissue. Into the S-curve
of a toilet drain where it clumps with excreta
like a den of sleeping bunnies before being flushed.
They’re called kits, actually. Their mother’s a doe,
and the act of birthing them, called kindling.
Such is the crutch of nomenclature and asphyxiation
of possibility, gone the gong of getting it wrong.
My daughter hasn’t yet learned to bristle at me
the way I do my mother, who once sang me
lullabies of night-stalking wolves who sweetened
their growls with chalk, who lured out baby goats
with the sound of their own mother’s voice.
I’d beg her to stop singing because hers, that looming,
metallic spike-bristle brush, could scrub off my own.
My private fear: silence, quiet as a gleam, unfolding
without her breath. Another: my daughter
freediving toward the black bottom of the sea.
I could be worth hearing, I tell my mother when she interrupts
again, as she flays a mango for pickling. I should have said,
I love you so much my skin dissolves. I can’t live without you.
Here, she says to my open hands where she pours
cubes of yellow fruit. Squeeze out the juice.
Actually, it’s nectar, but who’s hectoring, and who’s hectored?
I pulp it and she doesn’t sing, exactly, but keens. Like the hull of a ship
skating the surface above an orca and her baby, inspiring
not a song, exactly, but a warning. One such orca swam her
dead calf for a thousand miles, wailing. What I wouldn’t give
my mother. The mango tree in the backyard’s where her own
mother resides as a spirit, Ba’s fruit a telemetry borne from
flesh to pit, from daughter to dirt. How we decay at the
sight of mothers clutching their shrouded young,
our grief a tree, roots knuckled for survival, our fruit a black veil
of starlings just before threshing the world’s crops, at rest.
Avni Vyas is the author of the full-length collection Little God (Burrow Press 2021), the chapbooks When I Was A Barefoot Cloud (Anhinga 2024) Far from Glorious Feeling (TOA 2021), and co-author of Candy in Our Brains (CutBank 2014). She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at New College of Florida. You can read more of her work at avnijvyas