Mirror NorthWest

Kathi Morrison-Taylor

TOOTH FAIRY

My children treasure the quarters she leaves.
Speechless and secretive as God,
she takes their doubt. I wouldn’t know
what to do without her (gory gaps
somehow lessened by a handful of change) –
how to explain that first discovered
loss of self, how to reassure
eyes won’t fall out next or ears wither.

My children treasure the quarters she leaves.
I wish for her as my hair turns gray.
With magic she buys back bits of body,
intervenes as humans age,
makes light of bloodshed.
It’s up to me to act on her behalf,
spirit away incisors and bicuspids.

I hoard the evidence, enslaved
by motherhood. I cannot bear to throw away
their tiny nubs, milk-white and faintly stained.
Teeth gather in my jewelry box,
a witchdoctor’s jackpot, where ticket stubs,
charms, and chains tangle around them
on their velvet bed, red,
like a womb with memory.

CONTINUING EDUCATION

At my father’s funeral, an elderly woman confided in me. Close-cropped
gray hair and sparkling eyes, she took me by the arm. She had been
a member of his figure drawing class, the one that heard about the
car crash as they’d gathered the morning-after for their session.
She took me by the arm to ask me if my father spent his childhood years
in Pasco, and when I answered yes, she said that she had always
suspected but never said anything. She had been his fourth-grade teacher
back then, when he had been just as creative and intelligent, she said.
Would it have made my father laugh – the eighty-year-old sketching
nudes in his class, holding back her identity? His laughter cannot
belong to me. I receive her lesson of coincidence or lost serendipity.

EAT AND LEARN

Four vinyl placemats on our kitchen table
bear the motto Eat and Learn –multiplication facts,
a world map, the Jurassic Age, and a view
of all nine planets orbiting –
because we on Earth are messy.

Boy quizzes girl, “Spell Kazakhstan.”
A milk glass rests on eight-times-eight.
The table shakes as if answers wiggle
under breakfast plates. Food for thought:

Old friends flung far to the world –
Congo and Cambridge –joined by a dribble of sauce;
the island of Singapore a sticky dot
where a playmate moved last summer.

Cranky grown-ups scoot in chairs, slice fruit,
watch as colored spots and opaque ocean
suffer knife-fork-napkin archeology.
A little fist wraps a Clementine moon,

peeled to divide; scrim of grape jelly,
eye of an egg over easy, just barely closed.
Calories keep us from falling apart, wake us
to these moments of trivia and life,
our brains, groggy stars, hungry and rising.

MOOSE HEART, 1973

Larger than a human heart and frozen,
it stood in a roasting pan at the center of our circle.
As our third grade teacher, Mr. Carbone,
dissected the moose heart, he probed with a knife tip
into vocabulary –left ventricle, right atrium,
aorta, arteries, veins.

He asked us to consider how it looked like our hearts.
And I did. We all listened to him,
a peacenik in a mustard-yellow cardigan.
As I watched its purple gore melt,
my insides sank closer to the floor
and cold space filled my stomach
until my ears began to buzz.

I fought a faint. I didn’t want to imagine
the inside of my body, bloody
and barred by ribs, four chambers, flesh valves,
capillaries that webbed into extremities,
regressed into invisibility on a steel blade.

I knew my heart was safe, but this one,
opened and dead, sent me sadness
that thrummed through my limbs,
sent me sadness that knew my blood and said
agony, agony. Who could ignore
each frayed nerve absorbing pain?

No one noticed how I sank back
away from their lesson, nose close
to the all-purpose carpet. Only I knew
the battle in my head, a vermillion fading
as Mr. Carbone washed his hands,
lined us up for the march back to our room.
My heart still pounding
from its swoon of empathy.

CONTRIBUTOR

Kathi Morrison-Taylor grew up in the Pacific Northwest and completed an MFA at the University of Washington in 1989. Her poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Switched-on Gutenberg , Seattle Review, and other literary magazines. Currently she lives in Arlington, Virginia with her family.