Two Poems by Lindsay Lusby

By Lindsay Lusby

Girl with no Hands 

Her own father mistook her for an apple tree,

full-trunked and red-cheeked.

 .

So he hacked at limbs,

a bedlam of branches and hands.

 .

He believed in the fruits of his delirium:

.

.        that the daughter-tree cut back

.        would grow wiser next year,

 .

.        that the bees come to roost

.        would sweeten the crop.

 .

He tells her:

 .

.        If you love me,

.        you will leaf and bud.

 .

.        If you love me,

.        you will ripen. 

 .

A girl has two choices:

.

.        to be a tree or

.        to be the forest.

 .

If she leaves her father’s house,

she can shrink into

.

.        the dark alleys between oaks,

.        brimming gutters under brush

 .

with so many eyes shining out.

 .

They will coo at her,

call her red-delicious or pink lady.

  . 

If she has no hands,

she will go headfirst:

 .

.        by the skin of her teeth,

.        by the point of her chin,

 .

sharpening as she runs.

 .

If she follows that beating black bird,

she will tangle herself in understory,

.

in those quiet degrees of shade.

__________________________________________________

Lindsay Lusby’s poetry has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Midway Journal, wicked alice, decomP, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, and The Coachella Review, and is forthcoming in The Lumberyard and Sugar House Review. Her first chapbook Imago was published by dancing girl press in January 2014. She is the Assistant Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Read more about her at lindsaylusby.weebly.com.