heather hughes

PREGNANT IN THE EVERGLADES

If you lay yourself down
          in the soil of my home
you would find it sharp,
          full of the teeth of ancient
tiger sharks and the memories
of the bones of tiny sea creatures.

At noon nothing moves. I am
like the wading birds,
          half-settled, half-hidden in the
          emptied landscape.
Gators don't blink in this
          heat, don't groan across the grasses
to one another – burying
          their guttural internal rumbling
          in the glare.

Here I could bake
          in my own shell, grow
          heron-stilts and balance,
could be pulled apart
          by the emission and absorption
of soils. Waiting out the dry season.

Waiting for the tearing pain of instinct, for
          the inevitable jaws. Until
you sink back to palm
fronds and blackened pines,
          until the river digests all the words
I will never say to you.