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Two Poems
My face is small, compared
to the rest of me,
though maybe
others experience my face
as large compared to their
own faces or those
of their precious
brats, whose hats
are too big for their heads.
Small is good, it’s
been said, though not
of tits, yet tits
too large are just not done,
let’s say enormous
is evidence of overkill,
the pamphlets
say grow them medium,
foothills
instead of mountains,
trickles, not fountains.
When I was much
younger and with child,
the ultrasound lady told me
to prepare for big, big height,
weight, eyes, brain,
thoughts, big love
of Chekhov and airplanes
of the World
Wars, big trouble, big
impact, born, warned
the ultrasound bitch,
with the big purple cord
of a Gordian
knot around his neck.
I almost don’t want to mention them,
lest I break their spell, the wild asters
have taken ovaries
to a whole new level,
their bevelled sepals,
thorny
petals, like the barbed mop
of a precocious tween
in the gifted program,
her name, Althea.
The asters’ voices—
they only orate at night
under stars painted
by a middle-
aged whatshername
from the Middle
Ages—remind me of what
Gwendolyn Brooks called
the “voices
of my dim killed children”
in her poem “the mother.”
She read it in a gymnasium
somewhere
in Michigan in early fall.
Brooks told us
her throat was sore,
and announced she’d be drinking
warm pineapple juice
to ease her pain. I could see
its pollen hue
through the transparent stein
she sipped from,
a habit
I have since adopted,
though it burns to swallow.
Wild asters adorned Gwendolyn’s
frock
and the scarf she tied over her hair,
and asters swayed in the dark
at the border
of the gymnasium.
The stars that night
were painted as if a cheap
watercolour brush
had been used like an ice pick,
in a stabbing motion, by some
Althea,
some unbaptized bookworm.
DIANE SEUSS is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets. Her seventh collection, Althea: Poems, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2027.
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