Two Poems

Lauren Swift

after winter

I am always thinking of New Mexico, but

in two weeks I will be there again, in Los Alamos

I was cold there, growing up,

save for albondigas or caldillo

or posole in my belly—I pretend now in this poem

that those soups once staved the chill, though in

truth everything was tepid, warming nothing,

but it was still more than the nothing of the rest

and I slurped hungrily

I’m not sure that even imagined hot soup will do

this time. I think I could slaughter the multitude of things

people call beautiful—swans or sweeping forests or

women with daubed faces and

lean bodies or august gray wolves—and mince

them and spin them on a spit til they could be shredded tender

and even that would not do, for my history or present

I am not an executioner but I was born among them,

raised where deadly devices line the streets,

where there are blocks to rest your neck all around,

where the spectral axemen are always near

what would it be like, to sit with your assassin for a last supper,

to eat the same foods, the same meats spiced with the same

oregano and cumin, the same rices browned and then

boiled, the same tamales, toiled over in cornmeal and steam

what if they dribbled soup down their chin and you offered

them a napkin to blot it with

you share the same plate, but after dessert one must butcher the other

and who truly serves which role we cannot know

no one leaves Los Alamos without their head on some pike,

a constant throb for all of living

so, too, does no one do that beheading without a mark upon them,

without burning hands where they bore into the bone

what will I find when I go back—will I dine

with my executioner? [no, he long ago fled]

I think I will merely eat alone, travel past the old

house, the one where babies die in closets and

girls are made brilliant for life—and I might see

those old planters out front, if they are still there,

where I would bury marigold seeds

and where I would wait for the schoolbus sometimes and

crush red rocks under my feet, drag them along the concrete

like chalk—maybe they were an invocation, a plea, maybe those

smears read listen, I am praying,

where are your ears

borders

even when Cerro Grande had tired of its raging, all of

Los Alamos kept sloughing the ashes for months and

years, and once those were gone for wind and rain

and the snow that always comes, eventually, there

was still the reek, which got into everything, under

my nails, into the graphite in our school pencils,

the mountain water—once like throaty silk—

churned to smoky perdition by the alchemy of burn

there was one small miracle, though:

the satyrs were driven back

for a time, into their woods, into their freshly

flame-licked and barren pines

their leers were left to the unspruced

forests and the charcoal orgies of devastated stalks

before the fire they had always gone to town, looking for a

way to polish their horns. but small towns close early,

and when it was that time, they’d leave to clop up the mesas to

the joyless homes, looking to be satisfied for the night

mysterious things, fire and creatures from mythology, who

together stand on doorsteps like welcome guests though

the denizens within deny their thereness

all for show, though, as they are still ushered in and fed

wine and sopaipillas with the richest honey—I tell this because

the revelry would go on every night that I can remember

until that particular fire, when the wood-dwellers

finally became unwelcome

in the face of a larger pain

there are places in Los Alamos where scientists

take the things that make us human and pickle them

in jars, and when they’ve aged long enough they spin

in a reactor and become a bomb, and not just regular

bombs, but the kind which can irradiate the shale, the

bodies of the young, the way a family maybe ought to be

all this was backed deep into the woods for a time, and though

I want to believe in good, want to think

they won’t return when new green comes,

it’s a truth that hunger never ends, that we go

where there is nourishment,

no matter the harm

this feels like breathing that smoke all over again,

a sting in my lungs to think of how “atom bomb” and

“family home” and “ogle of satyrs” are towns just a

fiery bridge from one another,

how there’s only a small journey

required before they can pluck

from one another’s resources