nativity

I am the center child. I am rage. I am an orange picked in my great grandfather’s yard where the dog gave birth to her eight illegitimate dog children in the month of May. I am my dog, a real whore, who lay in labor beneath the orange blossoms and her eyes asked if she could be done now, if she could go inside and sleep on the cold tile floor of the four room shelter we made our crowded home and we all said no. You’re doing great. I am the canine slut, setting my head back down on the ground, my Gethsemane. I ache. I quiver. 

I am the dogbirth tree with deep, twisted roots and thick skinned leaves that make sounds when you bite into them. I bit them often as a child in the years before the fruit bloomed, a ritual enacted in both sweet curiosity and feral greed. I am the cool black dirt neath her body that day. I cradled her as she whined, yes, black lucious dirt sweet and soft in the hands. My tween fingers thrusted, tore top soil here on the days when the housefolk howled with passions and I walked outside for quiet. I dug till the sensation of dark matter clumped neath my nails sedated me. Earth tamed and was tamed, like in the early part of time. 

I am the firstborn dog, white and slimy. We picked him up, held him in our bundled bloodstained shirts. We saw his new heart beat through thin infant skin. His small lungs whimpered, newly airkissed and reasonably overwhelmed. I am those clumsy limbs, I am later long legs scraped against barbed wire for lack of an elegance never consistently dispensed. I am dog hair tangled, caught in the fence, a sign of my waywardness to be later used in bird nests by tasteless mother wrens. I am seven more dogbirths, each easier than the last. But still it was the firstborn, my own dog, the one who I raised. When in ten years he grew old and his eyes asked for peace, we shot him in this yard like his mother before. 

A garden grows there now all atop our dog deaths, and some loblolly pines that will not all reach adulthood or so I am told. They exist too close together. They cannot breathe, Yes, I am an orange, colored yellow like the ones from December 2013 I am the third of six children raised anxious, sunburned, soft. We speak often of old pets. I am an adult now, and I weep more now than then. I bleed on the tile as all mothers before me and it is said in the dark as if it is said by god I don’t mind at all. I mind. I notice everything. 

I am rage. I run in circles.

Jerusha Crone