Blushing Birds

    by Kristin Roedell

My restless daughter is changing:

a quaking storm

moves in her like a butter churn;

in time it will cause sweet cream to surface.

She is casting off selves,

crimson balloons freed from a roof

as blushing birds.

Against her tide,

I move in different directions.

I pull old selves to me

and remember now what I was

too busy to mourn.

I think of you–

pinkly clustered ovarian pearl,

slipping down a strand

towards my breathing womb.

Why did you pause along the way?

Like my restive daughter,

you would not stay

where you belonged;

you coiled in a fallopian tube

like a snail in circled shell.

There is no grave or stone.

There is this forking scar

beneath my naval;

at night I run my hand down its crooked spine

and grieve you again and again.

My Ectopia, for you

there is no sweet cream

or blushing birds.

(Ectopia: from the Greek ektopos, out of place)

© 2010 Kristin Roedell

Kristin Roedell graduated from Whitman College (B.A. English 1984) and the University of Washington Law School (J.D. 1987).  Her poetry has appeared in Switched on Gutenberg, Ginosko, Flutter, Damselflypress, Chantarelle’s Notebook, Eclectica, Quill and Parchment (featured poet January 2010), Open Minds Quarterly, Ekphrasis, The Fertile Source, City Arts, Breath and Shadow, Pilgrimage, Cliterature, Metromania and Four and Twenty.  Other poems will appear in Chest, and Voice Catcher Anthology and Soundings Review.  Her chapbook, Seeing in the Dark, was published in 2009 by Tomato Can Press.

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