Types of Inflorescence
Mangrove early 17th century from Portuguese mangue Spanish mangle
from Taino intertwined aerial roots
Tree with another tree twisted around it
like a giant ridged gray snake
The doctor seems freaked out I have so many veins
arranged on the ultrasound screen panicle corymb
cyme compound and simple umbel
He slices an opening in the side
of my breast and puts a needle inside
which flails around like a water hose he can’t control
in the yard unable to find the thing he’s looking for
my heart below
Mouth a little metallic pesticide-green grass
over the river to Big Snapper Cut Little Snapper Cut Callalisa Creek
Something hiding Hiding is the doctor’s word
Stabs my nipple from the inside by mistake
Sweat pouring off me as if we’re outside in the palmy air ninety
percent humidity
Screen to my right lit up red with my arteries something blue
a video game he is not good at
He cuts an artery explosion of blood (his words)
The screen clouds with my blood
the way the ocean can silt up from an incoming wave
He gives up pseudo med lingo: Is it posterior anterior
Now asks Is it up by her head or down by her feet?
Rummaging in my breast with the needle
the tech’s transducer a microphone above
He shoots a titanium clip from a stapler to land like an earring
inside my breast
To stop the blood he locks his arms straight out
presses down on me – If you’re not hurting her it’s not
working he tells Amber another tech
Bloody pink flowered top I’m snapped into – Let me get you out of this
easing it off my shoulder
Sit up stars
River an estuary brackish lagoon
a bull shark nursery
ocean’s cradle – many fish alligators three hundred dolphins
Manatees would come for the winter but pollution won’t allow
sea grass to grow You look better I was worried you were so white
It’s alligator mating season & Spring double whammy –
alligators hungrier as they get hotter
A 72-year-old man just lost his leg Trackers found his foot
in a gator’s mouth Run fast
Punch them between the eyes mouth open like a double ironing
board with teeth Fight as hard as you can
My new neighbor used to live in a nearby development with a lake
and had six water moccasins in his yard semi-aquatic vipers
whose other name is cottonmouth for the white inside before
their potentially fatal bite
Breast dark purple as if a bus drove over me paused
Three months to heal Still no word
My doctor said the pain can just be blood
Southeast Corner
On 6 March 1826 Yarmouth Selectman Voted: “That Thomas Greenough & other people of colour be requested to move their dead from the place where they are now deposited & bury them in the Southeast corner of the burying yard.”
how could we see under the ground
the graves become stars
then dashes
a way to map
he turns the trees back on
the headstone is a point cloud –
you can’t read them
you see one lying down
like a book in the brown
grass
dirt
i look for him on bass river the cellar
house henry ford’s windmill almhouse near gray’s beach
greenough’s pond now a boy scout camp walking into water
looking for thomas greenough great-grandfather
times 5
to descend is to climb down
fall
leap
3d
radio pulse 100 times
less than cell phones – high frequency
waves pass through objects
burial grounds usually in places
easy to dig – you can go pretty deep
to find unmarked graves look for a subtle
change in density –
less than the surrounding area
so the body is reflective
gpr looks like a lawn mower
radar antenna cables transmitter receiver ipad
time & distance are used to measure
hyperbolic reflector –
reflection from a target
a burial looks like a child under a sheet
reading a book
by flashlight
it adds pulses together
a burial is high amplitude
a finite length
reflective areas (red) are the dead
in a blue map
we’ll be going slowly down into the earth
it makes my right cheekbone ache
the ravelling of soil – decompositions – a pine box
a disco bruise may be a body –
one is an iron all
potential bodies
the forest can’t be searched
or the iron is a fish
a gray castle tipping on the edge of a gray island –
it plays like a movie
zone of attenuation – sign of earthen floor
relative north is not true north
before 1830 cemeteries were random
so had footstones to mark where a body ended
the lawnmower had a lot to do with improvements
to align stones
if a grave was marked
now another kind of lawn mower to find the dead
pushed by a geophysicist who tells us there are many bodies
unmarked graves under our feet they say there will be a zoom
in a few weeks to show us where they lay
our cemetery sand preserves disturbances well
in the sky we move toward the horizon in the southeast corner
always something like song
✶✶✶✶
Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections: Underwater City, the Florida Book Award winners Luckily and Five Kingdoms, and Spill. She is also the author of How to Live: a Memoir in Essays and I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and Mass Cultural Council Fellow, Groom’s work appears in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, New England Review, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is a nonfiction editor at AGNI Magazine. Groom lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida where she is director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts, an international artists-in-residence program.
✶
William D. Hicks is a writer living in Chicago. He is not the famous comedian Bill Hicks, but when he publishes his memoirs, they will chronicle the life and times of the other Bill Hicks. His poetry has appeared in Horizon Magazine, Breadcrumb Sins, Inwood Indiana Literary Magazine, The Short Humour Site (UK), The Four-Cornered Universe, Save the Last Stall for Me, and Mosaic. His cover art will appear on Anti-Poetry and Sketch.
✶
Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.
Another Chicago Magazine 