On the road south to Egypt,

with the baby nursed into

a milk-coma and tucked from

sight of eyes that mustn’t see

a holy child on the lam,

(though why the divine father

in the trinity of parents didn’t

think to douse the astral light

before the not-so-wise men

appeared and asked a king

known for slaughtering his

own sons where they might find

the boy who would usurp him

is a theodicean mystery)

did the human parents hear

the screams of mothers who

couldn’t hide their sons

from the heavenly spotlight

or the soldiers’ blades?

Were there not enough

angels to go around?

It would be years before

they could return, the king

dead and all those childless

women long lost to madness.

© Dana Hughes 2.10.18

 Pushed hard against the back-bone of blue horizon

the mountain-tops pile up and curl in a frozen spume,

whitecaps flinging froth like salt-stiff pennants in a gale.

These heights were whittled by shrinking inland seas,

their silt churned aeon after aeon ‘til the teeth of this

and the shell of that fused with just enough showing

for this iteration of creation to call such wonders Holy.

The sliding-down sun daubs the crest with coral,

a hue akin to the blush on a conch’s pursed lip,

conjuring ancient motes that mingle with tomorrow.

©Dana Hughes 2.5.18

The snow came by Grandma’s sifter,

applied with a practiced hand ‘til

a fine powder whitened the mountains

and brought their ancient creases

into soft relief like the grizzled lines

of your smile when you forget to shave.

©Dana Hughes 1.24.18

If my pre-teen daughter came to me

and said she was pregnant and God

was the father, and the fetus she carried

would be the one to save us all, I would

slap her face around to the back of her head,

which is likely what Mary’s mother did

when her girl announced that she’d skipped

a period.

The fury of this mother is easy to imagine,

given the small town in which they lived

and the speed with which such news

would travel door to door, like the tenth

plague in Egypt.

Looking into her child’s wide eyes, the mother

of Mary didn’t see the creche with nodding donkey

and cud-chewing cow, disheveled shepherds beside

gift-bearing kings, and a holy child in the middle,

his pudgy fingers raised in the universal

sign of blessing.

What she saw was horror; a thunderhead rising up

dark and foreboding, swallowing the sky, their home,

her daughter; spinning them all into the squall of

danger and shame.

She acted quickly, before the knowing nods

started, and bustled Mary off to her pregnant

cousin’s house in the hills far away where

the two could gestate together. Mary would

return childless, and the cousin would raise

a set of twins.

The heat of my palm cools; the hand-mark

fades on the daughter’s face in my mind and

young girls visiting relatives out of town

hold their breath and quietly give their

babies away.

Doesn’t it seem

that the bold claims of faith

asserting we were made

from clay and rib to meet

a holy need for friends

and placed in a garden

from which we were booted

because we did the one thing

we would not have done

if we hadn’t been told

we shouldn’t so that

we entered the world with

our firstborn named Sin

who still suckles at

our soured breasts,

growing fat upon our lean,

bending us down though

we strain to straighten,

believing we are only slightly

lower than the angels

yet queued for the gibbet

that is our due,

are absurd?

Consider the dinosaurs.

They neither toiled nor spun,

yet Solomon in all his glory

was not arrayed like one of these.

When the gates of Eden

clanged at our backs,

did we see before us

these majestic creations of God

receding in a sad parade

toward the unknown?

The clack and rattle

of dust-caked jawbones

shaped like but not

the same as ours

tell a tale we’d rather not hear.

©Dana Hughes 12.2.17

Today I decided:

I would get a dog.

It’s been six months

since we said good-bye

to the two that ran us

on short leashes through

the dizzy years of rearing

our biological pups.

they walked us at heel

into the days beyond degrees

when all of our muzzles grayed,

and we slowed as they did

until they asked that we

keep going without them.

Perhaps from afar they urged

me to hurry to the place where

the shelter dogs were being shown.

They may have persuaded that sweet

young mutt to climb into my arms and

kiss my cheeks, pushing my face from left

to right so that I saw the woman begging

for help with an orphaned kitten she couldn’t

afford to feed.

I understood the command and

accepted the change in plan.

© Dana Hughes 12.2.17

Perched between the arms

of an overstuffed chair,

she sat staring blank-faced

into space that was neither

here nor there, yearning neither

for what was nor what might be

but for a sharp pencil and

a clean sheet of paper.

She would make one column

of the things she meant to be

beside a second with the things

she had became, to include

the mixed degrees of success

in raising children and keeping

one husband (somewhat) happy.

Column three would hold a list

of pieces that had sheared off

since her birth like the twisted

bit of umbilical cord a baby retains

then sheds; a small desire,

a budded hope,

the unspoken possibility

of being other than who she was,

written before they faded entirely

from her view, one by one.

©Dana Hughes 11.20.2017

I forced myself to sleep like a fretful child

just after takeoff because the growing distance

between you and me made my head throb,

and eight hundred miles later I woke with a start

and pressed my temple to the glass as though

I’d only been looking out instead of dreaming

I was falling, and I saw the horizon split into blue

above and snow below only it wasn’t snow

it was clouds and I was looking at the tops of things

I’d only seen from the bottom before and they

opened up like pack ice breaking loose

in an arctic summer and between the floes

was an ocean of gray water with ancient peaks

beneath the waves only it wasn’t an ocean

but the dry land under the clouds and

the crests weren’t submarine mountains but

the folds of upheaved earth chafing the bellies

of cirrocumuli, and you were not there when

I turned to say “oh look!” and you’re not here

to tell stories of learning to fly and the grace of land

and sky when they linked arms in a reel and swung

each other round, and I’m not there to smile at

your memories and imagine I can see as you did.

No. We are parting, though we insist we are not.

Each time I go and you stay, we part,

like the land down below where a runnel

cuts a canyon from stone.

©Dana Hughes 10.29.17

We always said Mother was a magpie,

collecting trinkets of any shape or size

as long as they sparkled.

She adored the flash of the fake diamond

on her finger turning it this way and that

to blaze with light.

Though the real jewel of her mind dulled

and winked down to ash she still

insisted on wearing

a festoon of green and gold Mardi Gras

beads that she found in the street after

a parade had passed.

In the end we had to open so many tiny

boxes crammed with shiny things of

little or no value

and remember she was always a magpie

yet when she left there was no flash

of white on black wings

nor the blue iridescence of feathers in

flight to signal a well-made departure

just a faint swirling

as corner dust stirred when the covers

ceased their agonal rising and the hand

with the ring grew still.

©Dana Hughes 10.4.17