Lit in Progress

our unnursery, the brightest room with no furniture
a shoebox as luminous as the flesh of a mango

The sky presses its light, heat, its muggy thickness down,
arching smooth and hard, the white roof of an oyster.

“I had this, once, too,” the woman said, over the needle in my hand.
“You know it’s okay to be sad?”
My legs sweat under the blanket; I talk too much.

Heaven drips its muddy rain over brick houses in domino rows.
Drops slap against windows, splash in empty birdbaths

I wake in recovery, unrecovered.

Cry at the sight of prenatal vitamins, ignore the laundry
Spend time on messageboards, guiltily.

A pickup truck, a white crib in its bed
with pink printed linens dappling without a cover
turned wood bars curved, delicate, waiting
to be gnawed, bumped, grasped in wrinkled, inarticulate hands.

I’m a gas tank, a casket, a dry deep-throated gourd
with peeling paint, suspended from a mimosa tree
uninhabited