STORY FOR A GIRL
Kathryn Gray
I think only of my grandmother's spittled lips,
barely parting as she worked and whispered
the history of a baby born with a horse's head
to some girl she had known, whose
limbs loosed away from the straight and narrow.
How the months hidden under her skirts
skipped to her hips dancing pain, her pelvis near
splitting, until she bent her head over
that secret place, found a hard furred snout
poking out, the white strands of mucus stretching.
Bald eyes rolling back in mutual panic.
The rest followed like a flood:
snatching at its neck, the midwife clasping
the body between her legs, they wound twine
around and around, the tongue giving one
last wince to part the wrinkled sac, before
expiring with a muffled snort. It was said
that afterwards the bloodied nostrils transformed
into the soft turn of a newborn's nose, the hair shrunk
back to reveal a dead child's cheeks, inkwater blue.
And the girl herself was buried the next week.
the lesson was over. I struggled. It required some
interpreting. But when my first bleeds had come,
how I trembled, apple in hand, as I walked
past the stallion and his greasy flanks catching the sun
to feed the bruised mare. And every year, the same:
hay spattered heavy with clots, almandines,
rotting in the heat. You sleep against me now,
hissing your thoughts as empty, I'm sure,
as my belly is full with possibility; and I think how
my thighs have brought me back to all this,
how the turn of your back has brought me
back, at last, to this of all her stories
