Trauma Poet Surgeon for John Colfry Heather Ross Miller Not too long ago, my student in the soft green Virginia hills, today he cuts and patches while blood stipples his shoes in a perilous Atlanta, writes me he just saved a life, some man whose new wife butcher-knifed his chest. Cracked his ribs with a buzz- saw! he exclaims, Sewed up a still-beating heart! It was like, God, I don’t know what it was like! When I knew him, face still smiling, curving to cheek, the chin no hard definition, just some intense boyish wish to find his special skill and keep people well. Experience can scar the smile, define the cheek, turn Virginia hills bleak with winter. Still, he says, he writes poetry, still, he says, he keeps the talent I found. Parts leftover, maybe to protect the butchered, the still-beating and rib-cracked destiny of the man. Continue reading

Sufficient Unto the Day for Tina Heather Ross Miller A speck of a thing, deeply evil and intending harm has taken up with you, loving the way you bathe, your lemon smell, the way you call to your children. Now he has eaten some, he reaches out for more of you, your fiery hair, your very dreams in the lost worlds of your sleep. You must stop this roving thief, stifle his obscene stealth, quick- take back your sleep and health, quick- the dreams of your children. Continue reading

Swan Heather Ross Miller After Leda, what? Her sought-after thighs warm as new bread, glistening plump and buttery, a sweet scent of wheat. Of all his women, she cost him the most, cygnets in the stars, wars and angers, the dangerous tempers of the swans. And the swan? Now refusing his mate, swimming and swimming, frothing the lake in figure 8s. God stretched them, girl, bird, to cruel uncountable numbers - eggs laid in a bed of rushes, watched and warmed until a sword breaks through, off the leash. Continue reading

Sharing Heather Ross Miller A gorilla, a Dalmatian dog, and me, we make too much uric acid, get gout in the big toe. An affliction of the rich, those who feed on red meat and wine, viands brought on silver trays by maids in livery. Wild and hairy apes, white dogs with black spots, and an old woman from the South, we are not rich, have no silver trays, no maids in caps and aprons. Still these drops do not dissolve, swim to our feet, and sting. I give food, I give clothing to any who need. But, this shared provender of pain, this waste product of genes, I give to no thing. Continue reading

A Beginner’s Love Song for Sudie and Jesse Heather Ross Miller I want to come into your house, take all the keys off the piano and put them on you, and play you. Here is Middle C resounding your belly, High C, Contra C, a major scale, eight a piece, lovely keys up and down you. One lesson a week is not enough to learn the octaves of my harmony, the rhythms and signatures of my thumb timpani. I must make my own instrument of blood and sinew, I must take its music to you. Continue reading

Deja Vu Heather Ross Miller I must have seen you once or twice in the life before, such a bittersweet tang in the shadows of my mind, a run across the tongue, a flavor lost. You didn’t go anywhere, valentine, you felt the same, just hanging around, marking time, holding your cards. So what had we already seen? A long glimmering summer followed by uncommonly deep snow, and the moon flung over us like covers from the biggest and most careless soft bed. So there we were: wed, ripened with children, and then you are dead, and I am left in tatters, still catching the scent, still watching for you, just. Continue reading

Tell The Children Heather Ross Miller How we met in the middle of the thousand-acre woods, the air glowing with summer, not a breath to be left. Then you sat down in a chair beside me, still typing my reports, your green hat, summer straw, tipped back same as the chair, and you asked me out. You have vanished, along with the chair, and the summer straw, and my reports, spirits now, green as echoes our grandsons yodel over the mountain. Ask me out again, love, now while the woods fill with a thousand acres of snow, bring back hurry bring back, the girl and the man, make her fingers dance the keys, make the echoes glow. Continue reading

Ash Wednesday a love poem for my husband dead many years Heather Ross Miller See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! This must be a dream. One drop would save my soul, half a drop. And I begin to worry, not for Marlowe’s Faustus, but for myself, so newly come to the last days, surrendered to store-bought syrups and tinctures, the pounded pills and elixirs I’m told will clear and steer my exodus. I only want you to save me from the dearest evil, the dream that eats my daily bread, you only must come back me up and buy me out, hide me in our lost account. You redeemed the pawn ticket, believing I could find my way behind. But all night, love, I walk the empty stars, and feel the inchworm measure, and the cold threads wind. Continue reading

Taken Heather Ross Miller The clattering blades of her helicopter stay in my mind, the dragonfly swings west, lifting her to good medicine, I hope, good health, and magic. This is my daughter, taken in the late evening, brightest blood in her brain, can’t walk can’t grab - but she calls me again, Mama! and my hands are useless. I held her close, looking down, the old familiar cowlick curls same as the day she was born. I am weak with love, searching the sky, I want her back. Continue reading

Steal Away Heather Ross Miller We might paint a night rich with stars, brisk little feelings of fall in its breezes, putting a tiger back in the shadows, pale yellow striped black. Not aroused, even by the smell of us, he drowses, dreams better prey, and so we are able to steal away. Steal away, steal away to Jesus, the old people sang over us, those soft soft years so far lost, no calendar, no clock might find. Steal away, steal. But always, our eyes older, our smell stronger, we will remember the dreamy tiger. Continue reading

On the T Heather Ross Miller Corpus christi, Roman cross to the max. I am doing mass with friends, I a Protestant who worships empty altars, no wounded body up front for all to gawk at. Her little boy, just learning his letters, whispers, Who’s the guy on the T? Jesus, she shushes him, Jesus. He stares, whispers, I’m a little boy, I don’t need to say prayers. And I’m thinking, oh, God, child, everybody in here, and you and me, is the guy on the T. Continue reading

Broad Spectrum Heather Ross Miller Storehouse of inoculation, my body an aging host, those things they grafted on it, those buds and germs of awful disease: it still holds. Pertussis and diptheria, then smallpox - that first scab fermenting under a plastic bubble, ugly ugly, but leaving a dainty scar. Skin travels, you know, and takes its scars with it, and so smallpox shows over and under my arm. I am immune. Polio, typhoid, the summer contagions, long ago sun-tough legs walking walking through the valley of the shadow. Then today, the influenza of the ancients, pneumonia and shingles, I am a phenomenon of protections, a distribution of energy. And the skin still travels. Continue reading

Progressions Heather Ross Miller Ah, the smooth slip-stink beneath, so quickly plumbed away from me, makes me relax, look forward to the tasks of my day. No fault I waste myself upon the earth. No shame in honest stink. The aquifers are safe from me. So when I slip to lie below, I think I will be okay, and hope the stink rises to blend like pollen, spreading wild honeysuckle to share a sweeter and more permeable air. Continue reading

O Promise Heather Ross Miller The evil fairy at the wedding, the crone, the hag, took my arm and wheezed, You’ll be a bride about a year. Then you’ll be just another old married woman. Let me go in a breeze of lilac, fragrant as a princess, and left. I knew she meant bad cess to us, a price, a curse, a haunting oblige. Still we danced, love, danced the middle of the floor. I thought no more of her, my dress a full sweet petal. Ah, but the evil rises up, takes the baby in its crib, seats us silent across our table. And I must be able to cast it away back to some forgotten fragrant wedding day, a dust of lilac, a crumble of petal. Continue reading

Thinking About the Cats Heather Ross Miller He comes to me, arms full of dead kittens savaged by marauding dogs, little bodies littered over the yard. He insists they live, still warm, we just need to hold them until they revive, just feel the fur, they’re still warm! But the dream is not enough. He cries, cries, as I dig. Hugs each kitten before committing its body, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Those things went into the sand in rural Bladen, years, years. Today he calls from metropolitan Mecklenberg, a hesitant kind of apology, a human hanging-on kind of fear: Mama, he says, I was thinking about the cats. And I know what he means. Continue reading