Daughters

My house is full of blood.
And my daughters, now,
who used to be so cleanly
cleft, so simple, carry
the bit flesh in them,
shark-torn fish trailing
blood in the sea. Even
my tortoiseshell, delicate,
female, yowls when the
blood comes to her, and,
tail up in anguish,
drags her pretty belly
on the ground.

My house is full of breasts,
softly deep and nippling
beneath camisoles or
sweaters. I have to inch
around them. I have to
squeeze by, narrow. They
float above my daughters
in the bathtub, I mean, they
are my daughters’ in the
bathtub, pale, warm moons
in a watery sky, they who
suckled me now outdo me.

And though I do not stare,
my house is full of fur.
Already, boys
have touched it.
This, one daughter
tells me, and I think of how,
when she was born,
I stroked her arm so gently,
cherishing the vein-fine
skin, and swore no one would
ever hurt her.

*Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of two books of poems--Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003) and Five Terraces (Wind Publications, 2005)--and two chapbooks--The Trinket Poems and Walking Wu Wei's Scroll. She has received four Pushcart nominations, a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, the Poetry Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and two Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, online, and in anthologies. She teaches at the University of Mississippi and has held Fulbrights at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and Uppsala University, Sweden. In 2006 she is President of the 1000-member international Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She also teaches yoga. She and her husband, Peter Wirth, have five grown children.