Jacqueline Balderrama

Becoming a Mammal

A step— the first recognition
that the body was no longer floating
that probing digits, eyes, lungs
could be surfaced.
See the humid world and step
upon the strata once collapsing.
From the oceanic incubator, they slipped out
whole, without the brittle crust of
pale shells.
And grew, divided, ran, sprouting
thick coats of wool, solid hooves, once paddling
tails thinned to swishing rope.
But still drinking
their water mother
stepping in, looking down,
being unrecognizable.

previously published in Miramar

Giants’ Faces Held in the Hills

Late morning we occupy the space of our shadows
escorted each week through the yard of small white stones,
of whale-blue buildings named Palo Verde, Cactus, Kennedy,
Roosevelt, and the two spruce trees called sentries.

Neither inmate nor correctional officer,
I am between their words and the invisible women
that occupy workshop with descriptions of their hair
like water from a dry spring. My co-instructor and I,

we are new statues. We are pinstriped cotton shirts
and blue pants. We are slender fish between the gates. We
are our family’s names beside students also fathers, also
husbands, also sons, also inmates in their orange reminders.

Here they say, we are not cyclopses. Thank you for not staring.
We talk about Bishop’s fish returning to the water
with its hooked gums, about Pound’s apparitions.
It seems this prison is also a world beneath worlds.

Its residents speak to the outside from booths beneath sentries.
On ceremony, some gather in the sweat lodge gated under sun.
And I see none of this until a morning when the yard
is clear of orange, when we look past our shadows and theirs.

At its finish, they say, drive safe. We exit the yard.
Exit sally port, returning our radios. Exit door and outer gate until
the desert is un-netted from barbs and chain link. Until next time,
we return to giants’ faces held in profile against the dark hills.

previously published in cream city review

You and I See the Animals

1.

Lion summertime swallowed us up year after year.
We sisters picked neighbor’s apricots, peaches, nectarines.
We swung our legs—acrobats on ponies—from bike pedals to handlebars.

We puffed air into the nylon of our swimsuits
to make breasts like mermaids, the water holding them up.
That was when we started wearing swimsuits.

We were wetting our hair in front of our faces
then rolling the damp sheet of it back
to look like George Washingtons,
the hose twirling in the pool
until the last warm day had already passed,
the water too cold for you and for me.

2.

We listened to longer books on our parents’ bed, illustrated Greek mythology.
How silly all those gods and grown-ups,
chasing the sun, opening boxes, looking back.

Each night, sister, you and I thought we could undo our looms,
It was easy to cut thread with scissors,
as easy as unlacing our fingers from one another.

Odysseus had built that olive tree bed, each bedpost a growing tree trunk.
But Penelope was alone, sleeping on the left or right side of the bed,
then spread out in the middle.

He was off on one of those promises again,
while we were sure the bed had grown enough to lift off the roof.
Inside became outside, so animals wandered in following moths following light.

3.

We thought of lion summertime, speckled deer, antsy rabbits,
baboons, green parrots and crows sidestepping her bed’s branches,
invisible to the suitors, who only saw Penelope.

But the crows weren’t there for love, just olives, which they took
in the mornings like they do on our street, when olives fall purple and fat.
The crows stepping on split olives on bedcovers, made footprints all over.

This is the story you’re telling me in the attic of our garage.
I can feel the spotted fur of the leopard, the feathered necks of flamingoes.
We are all of those animals at once until

you’re bored waiting for love. You fly down the attic’s drop ladder,
leaving me in the rafters. You begin to sing, sister.
And then the story is over.

previously published in Poet Lore