after Naomi Shahib Nye

It was always her job to feed you, 
She forgot. Your mother’s smile rusted 
through can-bottoms, webbed expiration dates. 
Sandwich sighs, eat a second box of tuna. 
Your dead mother, you wanted to bake an infestation, 
the happiness of nothing.

Make friends, survive, not even air-needing, 
grub in a corn kernel. Curl into yourself, hands close
 on never, chiseled from the ravine a trilobite, trapped in stone. 

Forever finger-bones, cased books, coins stacked, 
kitchen cupboard with its freight of worm a house
 you loved, gone the way of flowered conversations
 with lovers who were dogs, aborted friendships, 
petals of poetry found 

unraveled beneath the hammock.
Find that solar eclipse sent from Guatemala the year
 your aunt wove a rainbow,  chocolate-staining dribble.

Strip away husk’s bandage,
every squirming grub that lives in the treehouse wallows, 
kernel-milk.
Bake.  

Bread. Measure crushed buckwheat, use a knife, 
chew your way through cardboard. When web-makers come,

boxes and cans of sauce stock the cupboard, 
expiration dates tattoo rust 
crumbling in your fingers.