Patricia Smith Poetry

GIVING BIRTH TO SOLDIERS

Feb. 1, 2005--Tabitha Bonilla's husband, Army Capt. Orlando A. Bonilla, 27, was killed Wednesday in a helicopter accident in Baghdad. Her father, Army Sgt. 1st Class Henry A. Bacon, 45, died in Iraq last February.

She will pin ponderous medals to her
housedress, dripping the repeated roses,
while she claws through boxes filled with
him and then him. The accepting of God's
weird wisdom takes place over forkfuls
of rubbery casseroles and the snowy vows
of newsmen who measure her worth
in cued weeping. She offers her husband's
hands, a shrine of their mingled smells,
a warm seat on a couch of napped corduroy.
They offer one polished bone, scrubbed
clean of war. And she babbles of links and
irony, shrugs her numb shoulders and feels
dimly blessed as a door slams shut on both
sides of her head. Suddenly, she is her
only history. Smiling politely beneath a fierce
salute, propped upright behind the crumpled
ghosts of her men, she is the catchy logo
for a confounded country. This day is the day
she has. Tomorrow, she will touch her own
breasts, she will dismantle a gaudy altar
with her teeth. And she will ask a bemused God
for guidance as she steps back into line,
her womb tingling vaguely with the next soldier.

speculum oris

The Speculum Oris was a scissor-shaped instrument inserted into the mouth of a slave to force the jaws open. The crew of slave ships would force captive Africans to eat so that they couldn't escape servitude by starving themselves to death.

the requisite tunnel
teeth in the way, tapped out
of the wailing
circle
oris
the weeping horn
iron hammered thin
stretches face bone to bend
tongue flails
signs scream
in this cave of stunned
speech
rusted screw pierced cheek
twist, tighten,
gums stretched bloodless
speculum
fat flies, not believing
their bounty, explore
dizzied by whispers
of oat rice threads of fat
woe is
snap shut
all thoughts of swallow
snaking head of possible
in the throat
you will eat. you will
live. eat. knees scissor
and knock no
to warm water, shredded
meat
last tooth leans, relents
skin welds
around this
iron becomes this
skin
around this iron
becomes this
skin