This Summer
I am very pregnant.
There is a spider in the bathroom.
Supper defrosts, slowly, on the counter.
One child chases the other;
the spider is still there.
How can you understand this? It
is so personal.
The child inside moves across my front
trying to straighten his knee.
At last, I take them all outside;
I steer my belly, my children
along the street:
we are so many ships.
We knock against the sidewalk.
We are so many stones.
Old women on stoops, shouting it's a boy, a girl
fall backwards away from us; the
dusty trees
tip backwards.
Only the heat gathers around us and sticks.
We roll home, three
wet balls of weather,
sloughing off our edges
trying to squeeze through the doorway.
