Sophia Stid Diviner, What’s Divine Here? I. In the photograph, my baby hand lies easy on her bending leg, sure as a hand on a bannister. My other hand in hers, caught mid-reach for the glass of beer she’s draining, top rim pressed against the bridge of her nose. Waxy slats of the pool chair writing red lines on the backs of her thighs— here, she could think, for a minute, as only one body. My mother only drank when she was breastfeeding. Her babies kept fat and happy, slept in her bed so she could breathe them. After the sixth, her pelvis clicked when she walked—the sound a kind of clock for me—I stayed close enough to hear. In the photograph, I see luxurious joy of skin knowing, skin-on-skin, enough, and water. The lawn hasn’t been that TV grass color since I was young, drought grasping on twenty-three years now, earth cracking the way a good loaf of sour bread mouths open, stretched across the top, edges made from the inside. She knocked on her bread to see when it was done— listen— she told me once she wouldn’t die till I was ready. Her lungs scraping her throat for air, her pain the only sound in that room, but anyway I said I’m not ready— Our hands. My fingers laced through hers like hangers somehow still
214
u
Crab Orchard Review