Jennifer Givhan DAUGHTER, LACE YOUR FINGERS TO THE SKY Rhythm banjos her skirts. Petticoats ablaze, your girl twirls, focused on the wall fleck, the spot she will spin to, to keep from dizzying, from flying off bridges or backs of chairs for pirouettes with a boy who pumps her blood with red the girls will shun. Eat your carrots. Don‟t blame the mother. Your baby girl swung in the bassinet across the stiff tulle tutu strung from the window sill along with your hopes. She slept beside you in the bed that smelled of breastmilk, your life in her mouth. You ate green and soy so she would grow. Still you could not keep her From the dance our bodies dance when we let the boys take us out into the country and oh the moon may have been full and oh the hay may have smelled sweet as lighted sky and sweetened earth silhouette backseats. Even through black veils, we can kiss and skin pierces fabric. She let the girls in the stalls and the jeers in the halls and the “slut” on the walls twine her neck bones, string her atop a chair. But her dog didn‟t bark and no one knocked and God didn‟t send an angel. And you, mother, found her swinging from the doorframe, and the moments flown away
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