It's all coming up now, 

milkweed and mango, 

grandmothers in kitchens 

with their stoic spoons, 

crows barking in alder trees, 

enough dead deer to overflow football stadiums,

sad fathers with their boots and hammers,

sad mothers with their martinis their teal convertibles, 

poplars and pomegranates and Paris balconies, 

merlot, rodents, fourteen falls for every summer,

lovers' backs, lovers' white hairs, lovers' cancers,

dropped glassware, children wide-eyed and ink-tarred 

holding hands with goddesses, hurricanes, bird houses, 

police officers, mountain fog, fried chicken, refried beans, 

childhoods bristled with trains, with flowered fields, with scabbed knees,

blood of the mouth, blood of the genital, blood of the hand,

body and body and body and body and body and body and tongue,

the pricked blisters of one hundred sunsets, white trucks, silver fish,

seventy-two moons, thirty-three horses, orchids, zinnias, persimmons, currants, 

sparrow and heron and magpie and blackbird and crow and falcon and gull, 

until, finally, a tortoise no bigger than a softball skids across the table.

In red nail polish it says "Cheryl" across its shell. 

I slip it in my bag to nibble on later.