Mother’s Teeth In the prairie across from My mother’s apartment, We find, in the moonlight, Bones, laying humble On the black ground, More ash than dirt, From the controlled burn The firemen had to set. Glowing white, An opossum's fleshless smile. We ask the prairie If we can take it home, And she says nothing. We carry the bones through the switchgrass, Where we hear an animal dying. It wails loudly, And then it is done. Like a warning, Come too late. The next morning, My mother tells me she was visited In her dreams By a monster that Stretched its great mouth And crushed her inside it. To return the bones, She must walk back through the prairie, Where the big bluestem grass once, A hundred years ago, Inspired the Nanabozho spirit to say, “All powers have two sides The power to create And the power to destroy.” The prairie is bordered By that belt of corn, That fills a million American bellies, On one side. On the other, A parking lot. It is through here, That she must leave. To go home. Where she may rest and put her feet up. And try not to wonder why Mother Nature might have wanted her teeth back.
Shopping List There is so much to be had. Every shape imaginable Ceaselessly marched before us Echoed In plastic. There are so many cures To that wily, wandering, wary Insatiable feeling That I do not have the right thing. So impotent am I Before the holy advertisement That supersedes the sunset That becomes a kind of god That offers me exclusive salvation. Behind the billboard The sun is sliding towards the horizon Like a bird encountering a clean window Falling, unnoticed, unseen, Perhaps even scoffed at. The sun which holds nothing, That old, forgotten, once worshiped thing, Gives everything. In just a moment, The sun will shine through the crack in the billboard And it will remind me That there is nothing In the entire world So noble As being empty handed.
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Maggie Traxler-Lavengood is a student at Fordham University in New York studying Film and Digital Media. This is a debut publication.