by Misty Kiwak Jacobs
Geckos with visible hearts like
blue dots of ink gather, have
gathered, each summer night
for 35 years, saying, doing, nothing
just resting in the spirit like
a Quaker meeting. The smallest ones
find the breezy seams in the windows,
pass through, slip
behind a picture frame,
die if I don’t find them.
The first woman to live in this house
felt her uterus calcify here
a stone monument to life
hollow under her dress
her children unable to cling
to the slick hard walls inside her
the canal bank behind this house
broke, water flooded in, seeped back out
through the walls, softening them.
My husband and I bought the house
there can be no such thing as curses
“fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage”[1]
and still, life slipped from me.
Cursed shall be your basket
and cursed your mixing bowl[2]
cursed my womb as jets fly overhead,
full bellied and benign. I search
the smallest, most unlikely places:
behind the picture frames
between the dusty spines of books.
Where are the children?
Scent of orange blossom, incense
from an empty thurible,
I carry the lizards outside.
[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2266
[2] Deuteronomy 28:17
An Arizona native and recent transplant to upstate New York, Misty Kiwak Jacobs is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and a Master of Divinity Candidate at Yale. A Pushcart Prize nominated essayist, her work has appeared in The Sarah Lawrence Review, Red Rock Review, and Minerva Rising, among others.