Because they were DOCTORS, she said,

I believed they would help me, believed

in their knowledge, in their experience,

their Hippocratic oath, our common humanity,

for God’s sake.

They saw me arrive full and leave empty

again and again through years of trying

to bring just one child into the world

and they shook their heads and shrugged,

muttering

something about how these things happen,

it’s normal, nature’s way of taking care

of what isn’t meant to be, but after number

nine fell out in the fourth month, it seems they

might have seen

a pattern; done an exam before the end began

instead of after. If my color matched theirs,

they might have said CERCLAGE instead of SORRY

and BEDREST not BIRTH CONTROL,

but we weren’t

and they didn’t, and my hands that ache to hold

the one thing in all the world that I would give

my life for are clenched rather than clasped

in prayer as I beg the Lord to forgive whatever it

was I did

that made those babies slip from my womb’s grasp.

I think of Sara, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth,

and wonder how many lives they lost, expelled

in a field or by a stream, not because they were barren,

but ignored.

© Dana Hughes 4.18.18

Sitting by the window of the bus,

she was trapped by the man who

took the seat at the aisle as well

as her voice when he placed his

meaty hand on her thigh and kept

it there knowing he had her for

as long as the ride might last,

certain from a glance that she

would hold still because she was

raised right, a polite girl who

avoided strangers but could never

be rude. She said nothing, of course,

only stared at the window where his

reflection leered with the smug

pleasure of a cur that has cornered

its prey. When at last he rang

the bell and was gone, she exhaled

the breath she’d held for blocks

as tears of rage sluiced down her

cheeks, salted with fury that with

all the proper behaviors she’d been

taught, she never learned to scream.

©Dana Hughes  4.17.18

That crow attempting to fly with her mate

in the midst of a windstorm that has thrust

her aloft into the vortex of feckless flapping

and furtive glances down where he flies

perpendicular to the ground, for the most part

in control but unaware that above,

his darling has lost hers,

is fully aware that though their species loves

to kite on a fine updraft when the sun is warm

and nothing but pleasure comes to mind,

this buffeting squall snapped the tether and

she is not kiting but kite, with wings outspread

and still, ascending like the Virgin only faster.

God alone knows when or if she’ll return.

© Dana Hughes 4.13.18

“Can you imagine?” she asks,

which my ear receives like the SKRITCH

of a match head and WHOOSH, my brain

is alight like dry wood in a pool of kerosene,

erupting into phantoms not my own but another’s,

crackling with inventions of sights not seen and

sounds not heard, like fabric caught on a fence that

shreds in the wind to become a siren’s hair wafting

below the surface of the sea whose rolling foam

is salted by tears spilled from cheek to river to

the wide gulf between joy unknown, grief unparsed;

an apron cinched tight round a thickening middle,

an ember clinging to the smoked down butt fished

from the grass and passed pudgy hand to pursed lips,

dishes clattering from table to floor, baby’s cry and

dog’s howl mixed with the half-tuned jumping song

sung over and over and over to the beat of Ked’s

and rope in the driveway, the fireflies flashing their

idolatry to the stars. Angels and demons swear like

sailors and refuse to release their hold so these

unstoppable thoughts keep coming

because I can, indeed, imagine.

© Dana Hughes  4.9.18

A span is the width of a hand outspread,

a cubit runs elbow to middle finger tip.

An inch is knuckle to end of thumb,

and the height of a horse is hand

upon hand upon hand.

The first rulers were our parts and we

took the measure of things with what

was on hand, which was a hand,

or the limbs attached thereto.

The lines that march along the length

of a yardstick are precise while

the reach of fabric held nose to

outstretched arm is a yard of trust

that the one who measures

measures true, and the flesh of

any nose and the bone of any arm

is close enough.

Beside you towering over me I feel

less than though my foot is a foot

despite my knuckle telling otherwise.

Notwithstanding the evidence of

discrepancies in size I must trust that

we are equal, my brain no less nor

more than yours, each heart moving

the volume of blood we contain

so the depth and breadth of us paired

doesn’t tip, unbalanced, like a scale

when the finger lingers to raise

or lower the price.

© Dana Hughes 3.30.18

Executing a perfect layout in a game of Ultimate

and landing on his shoulder, he heard more than

felt the bone snap like a chicken leg in a dog’s mouth,

and the teammate that grabbed his hand and pulled

him to his feet was shocked by the changing colors

in his face as his knees gave way and sat him down.

At the Emergency Room the nurse failed to ask or

notice his level of pain and walked him the length

of a merciless long corridor to radiation where the

x-ray technician reduced him to lip-bitten tears.

No break is simple, despite the diagnosis as bones

though hard are living tissue and not impervious

to injury, and even with their ability to mend, it is

the process that keeps the afflicted suffering while

the raw ends with marrow exposed begin knitting

together again, producing a net of fibroblasts that

spans the divide like a bridge under construction,

mortar and steel inching from solid ground to the

center of air with an engineers confidence that the

two will meet and the weld will hold.

It’s the reaching, the intuiting by one jagged end of

the other and cell by cell, recreating a whole from

pieces that causes every breath to catch like ours does

in the effort to align what we have sundered through

the years of leaps and layouts made with full knowledge

of gravity’s pull. I’ve held my breath against the hurt

as long as I can, but regardless of how far the healing

has progressed, I can’t not inhale.

© Dana Hughes 3.22.18

At the Museum of Natural History the bones

of forebears Jurassic and Cretaceous stand

like neighbors at a picnic; T. Rex flashing

a toothy grin and waving his runty paw at

the Stegosaurs across the room who know

better than to encourage his cordiality.

It’s a relief to learn one’s place in the universe,

which despite the insistence of ego is not at

the center. We’re not first or last in this

turning loop of creation; Adam and Eve were

Tetrapods in the swamp of sacred spit and

we’re the in-between of them and what’s next.

One of these days when Earth heaves California

onto the steppes of Mongolia and our remains

are pushed to the surface, will our successors

dust us off and glue us together, give us names

their children recite with a shiver, and wonder

what became of us, or will they even care?

©Dana Hughes 3.12.18

In the windy season the birds

leave their perch without intent,

whisked sideways by a breeze

that feels like a hand slapping

them loose from the branches

that should but don’t provide

shelter at this time of year when

flying is a war with the weather.

Are we not sheets, battered like

these birds by something fierce

that pulls us flat-out and snapping

from the line until at last the pegs

yield and one or the other of us

vaults skyward and is gone?

© Dana Hughes 3.5.18

The couple in the corner sits side-by-side

before two plates of eggs and two coffees.

He holds the morning paper in his left

and forks food and news to his mouth

with the right, so riveted by the latest

presidential barbarity that four bites in

he missed the plate and speared the table.

She, on the other hand, stares at or through

the window, unblinking, breakfast intact

but for the single taste of what he ordered

for her, a fleck of scramble adhered to her

lip like the last of her senses that have not

yet let go but will be wiped free when the

check is paid and the dregs of the cold black

coffee and the bitter truth are swallowed.

© Dana Hughes 3.5.18

On a Lenten Sunday morning

with the ten unambiguous rules

of conduct that God delivered

the focus of the sermon which

is both ambiguous and confusing

and far too conversant in the

lower-case S version of sin,

insisting it is we who must do

the forgiving rather than mention

anything so ponderous as the

upper-case S version of which

apparently we shall not speak

lest it raise it’s snake’s head and

hissing, remind us how we made

it ours even though we keep it

in the dark, we think, where it is

over-fed and under-confessed.

And yet the woman in the pew

ahead who arrived a minute late

and breathless loosed her scarf

and revealed an unkempt braid

coiled up high and clipped in place

though a curl at the end escaped

and flopped to and fro with

the rhythm of the hymns.

I reach for the clip praying that if

this small mess were undone,

her hair smoothed and divided into

a trinity of equal parts and without

hurry woven neatly over again so

that curl is tamed to twist ‘round

the finger of God, this hour might be

redeemed and a small portion of our

collective Sin given up to grace.

© Dana Hughes 3.3.18