She means young starlings wrapped in kitchen towels,
orphaned cottontails found in the schoolyard,
splay-foot chicks with legs bound.
Still-blind kittens, once hungry and crying,
pulled from behind a woodpile.
The injured goat kid no one else wanted.
The daughter who wanted to name them all.
My mother’s gift to me when I left home:
the necklace I wear for luck now
because my grandmother,
who died when my mother was four,
wore it and had none. My mother, even now,
waits for me in a white room
while I am stitched back into myself,
and hugs too hard, as certain as she has always been
in her belief that the needle hurts less than the splinter.
That a cup of table salt poured into an old sock
and microwaved can draw out an ear infection.
That you might as well try.
I didn’t realize for a long time that we were reading
not just books, but birds. That I was learning
to keep looking for what was gone
as if it would be the last place I looked.
I wish I could speak to my mother before I knew her,
when she was an orphaned girl
who sat listening to the windy prairie pre-dawn,
the field of stars beginning to fade away,
her cheek against the rising
and falling ribs of the brown-eyed cow
that breathed mist into the gentle darkness.
The warm milk that pinged into the pail
as unremarkable as a prayer.
I’d tell her, You were always wanted.
I want to believe that I am beginning to understand now
the work it takes to live.
All the hurt and the miracle of it.