Ballard Street Poetry Journal

A girl drifts along the corridors of her body, and wonders
if she remembers how to open her right atrium.

With blood, there is always something at the threshold:
a lung, an eye, a breast-bone suffocating, but what

of second cut grain or the braided fingers
of strawberry vines— the girl recalls the clay

lamp she sculpted in Sunday School; how
the burning was symbolic for something lost

from patchwork quilt to basement to root cellar—
the small, dank pit— a womb: her map begins

here. She turns new lamps from tuber skins—
hangs one at each lymph node, vessel valve. She

illuminates every statue of Christ, every winter home.
To be in the map and of the map: She

moves by visceral touch and infrared heat;
yet on nights when the wind bleats and the axe

still contacts the block, she oscillates between
light and milk, life and death: drifting,

but it is hers to drift. Hers to drift—

Dorinda Wegener holds a MFA from New England College where she was a Joel Oppenheimer Award recipient. She has poems forthcoming in The Antioch Review, Indiana Review, and The Marlboro Review. Previous work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander. As a child, she lived in Robert Frost’s first NH home prior to his famous farm. She currently resides in Wilton, NH.