Poetry by Janet McAdams

     Heath Cajandig CC




Triangulation


Three of anything is a signal
twice a coincidence and so
the stolen girl ravels the pink thread
into three threads, barely a whisper
on the wooded path where we are searching.
The girl isn’t stolen but lost, Gretel’s
shadow sister, she’s the one who’d never
push an old woman into fire.
She’d offer her own finger, her longest toe,
or peel the thickest muscle from her chest so that 
should she live, she’ll walk the world with heart 
unguarded, a bony crate of tenderness.
So that’s two sisters and a witch.
They say there’s a brother, plumping up 
for the oven. Or hiding his feathered arm, 
to save her from burning. If you can believe that. 
Men write their own stories. 
Bring your bones closer and I’ll teach you how
to muffle a cry for help by crying louder. How
to put out fires, by which I mean stories.

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Seine


When she went, I unheard the world
nodded at mouths and their kindnesses
dulled by six feet of water and its silence
until gasping, I surface, 
and sound, like a gunshot of sorrow, came back. 

Let me never swim that water again.

Then came the season of coughing, of calling out bodies. 
I was that glad she was long ago among the missing,
that he, in his grief, followed soon after.

Across the shallow estuary I wade 
with my four siblings, the row of us like searchers
seining water for a child 
whose body will not be found. 
This is a memory of what didn’t happen--

a scrap of dream. How in dreaming
you’re always the dream’s child.
The dream child wandering 
from the house we let go too easily, 
room after room where I listen 
and cannot call out.

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Janet McAdams is a writer, editor, and translator. Her first book, The Island of Lost Luggage, received an American Book Award. Her other poetry collections include Feral, the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After, and Buffalo in Six Directions / Búfalo en seis direciones, a bilingual edition of her new and selected poems, recently published in Mexico City and Patagonia. She lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
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