Refuse
Once in Yachats, the girl encounters a vision of light.
Gutted in the darkness of the hallway at night,
with nothing holding that small woman in place but knifed ether.
“Mama?” She asks,
and the figure replies, not with sound, but blue pulses,
and flashes she is both here and not here.
Girl fish bones ’round the corner
into the murk. Sees father
winched in sheets, limbs trawling
for bloodied, stolen heat. Mouth thrashing, gulping,
“They’re riding her!”
Later, when she drops her handful of dirt,
she knows mother came to her,
to her alone, she grinned,
not to her tangled twin brothers.
Buried by sunset, three bodies
entrenched, two never to be birthed
tucked in under a mountain of tamped down clay.
The middens of miscarriage.
Blue pulses swim across the saltwater, splashing,
bucking the burbling unborn off luminous shoulders.
bucking the burbling unborn off luminous shoulders.
If they are children,
they are subject to death.
If one prefers Angels,
they can fly straight to hell.
This girl is not comforted
and will claw her way up Cape Perpetua
with grisly nails and enflamed hind legs.
This will consume her days
and combust her brain.
The father will set sail for the watery sea.
Casting his net ever-wide, ignoring
the girl’s arsonist heart, her abandoned fire.
Amy Baskin is featured in Cirque, VoiceCatcher, Friends Journal, and more. She is a 2018 and 2016 Willamette Writers Kay Snow Poetry Award recipient. When she’s not writing, she matches international students at Lewis & Clark with local volunteers to help them feel welcome and at home while in Oregon.