Bread and Bread

the boy with the girl's name, had been able to follow his father from house to house  to White House he would have said Stop, look at me — and presented his face, still made of newborn clay, but already hinting at the fullness of humanity: furrowed brow, bowed lips, eyes watching his parents' every move. If Nevada Alexandra's eyes had been given the gift of time, they would have settled into a mirror of his father's: cash-green, with flecks of darkness. Nevada Alexandra listened from the womb  as his father spat out his own father's words and then ran from them. Safe inside his mother,  Nevada Alexandra gave her the gift of grief, bits of genetic code lodged in her bloodstream forever, tasting like ache and impossibility. She broke, forever— or so she would have said, but he saw her grow into a twisted vine. Nevada Alexandra watched over the next baby, a girl with a boy's name, and whispered, Your eyes are your own, and they can change with the light. But Nevada...

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash If you were a snowflake— your mother a glacier, your arms branched and reaching— the photos would melt you.  The blast-orange light revealing a thrown-back head, flames marching along an IV tube, blaze branched, arm reaching. You would throw your cold body on the fire, turn to steam. You would mourn the loss, condemn the evil. But you are a fist of coal— not hard enough to become a diamond,  you are disappointment in the toe  of a bad child's Christmas stocking. And so you file the photos between Guilt and Luck in your dewey decimal mind.  Your mother was a librarian, your father an engineer. Their shared currency was worry. So when you wonder if you are dying, if your CBC is tea leaves, if animals can smell cancer,  is this self-love or -hatred?  Ego is a red herring, a lavender menace. And when you thought, But they're probably not even sick, they were probably in the hospital because of the war,  you crowned th...

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash What if we have it all wrong; God didn’t give her only son because she so loved the world but because her son loved the world and she loved her son? The question mark— does love mean holding tight or letting go, or that damn serenity prayer? If love is knowing the difference, if love is knowing,  even God is agnostic. God saw the darkness and created light, but with it, shadow. God saw war and famine, limbs severed for not meeting quotas, gaslit lovers and neglected children, the buzzing thousand paper cuts of the internet. Jesus saw hillsides strewn with poppies, tide pools bright with sea stars, kindness among strangers, decades-long marriages,  the daily comfort of a group chat.  God did not want to be right about this one. Prove me wrong, she prayed—gods pray to their own children— and show me that I haven’t created ruin that will ruin you.  After all of it—the betrayals and the blood, the cave and the miracle, God’s son co...

You are not from my body, but I gave you my body because it was all I had  those lean first months (and by lean I mean I gorged myself late at night when the Bad News Factory had shut down for the day, I hoped; I breathed in quesadillas and breathed out fear). My mind was stuck in a sandy ditch, somewhere between 2011 and our last failed adoption that spring: We skipped stones in a manmade lake and left Reno without a baby. When you arrived, somehow too early and too late,  I was a sad spinning tire, a clock missing half my cogs, but still right twice a day. You: a 32-weeker, a four-pounder, quick to shake off your rocky entry into this world: You arrived breech but righted yourself, right as my world turned upside down, again. I fussed and projected, wondered if I wanted any of this. But your name means baby kangaroo and I pocketed you, like something coveted and stolen. My hold was not sweet, but it was steadfast. When you slept on my chest, our hearts were inches apart. Yo...

You never told me I was anything but beautiful so this feeling—that maybe I'm made of oil instead of breast milk— is a betrayal of what you gave me. I've been obsessing over the contents of the diaper of the second grandchild you never met: the shit, the lack of it, the holding back of something ugly. Was that slick brown thread mucous, a red flag according to the nice lady on the nurse line? Was it me, a sort of gollum, a mirror in a diaper, a monster, but tiny and powerless? Photo by Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash The second child in our family— my first family, I mean, of origin, as they say— is the only person who holds a mirror up to your ghost, the only person who could say "Oh honey" the way you did. Her curly hair, her kindness. But I hated her at first.  Another firstborn might declare the baby to be the monster, the interloper, but I stepped into that role myself just like I stepped into the baby sweater  I'd long outgrown. The yellow acrylic yarn was itchy,...

Eventually there's only a riddle, the old one about the ax— its head and handle replaced a thousand times. Are you steel, once sharp, now dull? Or are you the thing it splits? Are you the swinging or the replacing? What is the trigger and what is the tragedy? What is the doctor visit and what is the disease? Is the fourth baby you almost adopt an echo of the first three or of the two you never birthed, who would be ten and a half now, but who is counting? Every sad thing deserves its own museum, but every museum has the same glass case, the same new paint smell, the same paper towel vendor Did 13 people die in a mass shooting or were there 13 mass shootings last year or last weekend? Eventually your body becomes a museum of everything that happened and everything that didn't: the sturdy handle of your spine the ghosts of your ovaries the holes filled the way the ocean consumes volcanoes with flat glittering blue Eventually there are no more words or there are only words, it...

  The Identified Patient Is crying again Is talking too much Made it all about her Brought up the thing we agreed not to talk about Is letting her child watch YouTube again Is letting him see her tired face, shiny with tears Sent a bitter text and drafted a worse one Ate all the Cheez-Its and drank your Coke Is not over it Is moving on too quickly Is not taking a break Is not asking the pregnant woman about her due date Does not want to be at this party, and it shows Did not keep your work deadlines in mind Is not getting the right kind of therapy Is too much like your mother and her own father Blogged about it Got fat Worried and worried and worried Flew too close to the sun Hates fun Wasted years Is obsessed with productivity Acts like no one suffers but her Nags too much and not enough Can’t win Uses annoying phrases like “I can’t win” Doesn’t see how much she’s won Is steeped in guilt like water becoming the blackest tea Is sorry Apologizes too much Wants her child and someone ...

The zookeeper’s bathroom becomes a nest: dirt and twigs from sink to toilet, the bathtub a makeshift pond. The shoebill is part cartoon: beady eyes and a loafer for a beak. The zookeeper’s wife becomes a zookeeper, dropping a slice of stale bread into the bird’s smile.  The zoo tower becomes lookout and barricade. A black gun as long as three men points at the sky, reminding airplanes that they are not birds, or that they are: as easy to down as a duck. The ears of giraffes and antelopes, built to hear lion paws on leaves, hold the sounds of bombs and flak guns. Their bodies tell them to run, but the cage bars say otherwise.  Two hippos, a black rhino, a sea elephant, and eight land elephants become meat. People who thought the worst part of their job would be sweeping shit now eat their charges. Now there is more waste than ever to shovel. Now there are not enough dust pans in the world. Now the world becomes a dust pan. Now they must admit: tenderized crocodile tails taste l...

If you think about the game , you've already lost. That's the whole game. You might approach someone, perhaps at a party— perhaps there is brandied eggnog, or maybe it's a cooler full of beer, juice boxes for the kids, in celebration of the end of soccer season, or a savior's birth, or the strong possibility that soon the days will get longer. You would say, "You've lost the game," and it would be true because now you've passed the torch of consciousness like a virus to the person closest to you. There's no winning the game. It was invented by the British, of course. Land of fog  and consumptive moors, land farmed to the bone.  Maybe this resignation  is what happens after you conquer a continent or two, leverage a famine to your advantage, make the locals bring you tea. And still it tastes bitter, and still your wife finds you a bit disgusting  and your children grow up and write books about the terrible things you've done leveraging that educ...

1. The peaches this summer were inexplicably good. The ones from Trader Joe's, I mean. Trader Joe's —known for all those plastic clamshells and sad hard oranges. But there they were, better than we deserved: ombre globes the size of tennis balls, the big soft ones that our son keeps hitting over the fence. Run-down-your-chin juicy, though I always cut them up, because why ruin something exquisite with a sticky face?  I tried to eat them all. I did. I bought them in cardboard pallets and by the bag. Accuse me of all the contemporary sins: working too much, planning and fretting, checking pandemic stats like the weather. Bending my head toward my phone until my spine is a floor lamp, an inverted J. Despairing because we might not, in fact, upgrade our wonderful lives to extra wonderful in the space of a month.  But who is here, like a motherfucking Zen master, enjoying seasonal fruit? Photo by Vlad Deep on Unsplash And now it's almost gone. Now pears are populating the shelv...

As an oversized kitten, he chomped the hand of a friend, and we said, I'm sorry, he's still figuring out what kind of cat he wants to be.  Which is to say: he is not a metaphor any more than he's a bad omen flitting blackly across someone's path, but I must tell you this— A year ago a new cat moved in; we brought her here, I held the door  for the invading army, and she marched in On short legs, waving her tortoiseshell tail, purring and rolling for the humans,  but chasing him down like a tiger He scaled the nearest fence, a big brother witnessing the horror of an infant, and disappeared, but he never bit or clawed her. He's figured out what kind of cat he wants to be. We don't see him in the sunlight anymore, and this is my great failure, among many. My mother birthed my sister because she loved having one child so much, she thought why not two; she ruined my life and created my best friend. It only took us twenty years to retract our claws. When I say this ha...

They tried shutting her away: their strange blue-eyed girl who brought ice to life, but they’d read enough fairy tales to know stone towers don’t hold. Agnarr erred  on the side of concealment. He had a kingdom to consider, not to mention  their younger daughter, not his heir, but always  his favorite. Iduna remembered the forest of her birth, how the leaves turned plum and rust each fall and the reindeer’s coats  grew thick and musky.  She knew the weight of carrying another world curled inside your cloak. Their strange girl belonged to neither fjord nor forest, and it frightened them.  How to prepare her to use her own power when Iduna herself scarcely understood it? How to prepare her  for the ways fear could curdle into cruelty? It was dangerous to sail in winter, Agnarr argued. It’s dangerous not to, Iduna said. She had a map, a song, a memory of nursing a young man from another land  back to health.  If it was so wrong  to choose t...

I understand a little better this year, when the air is thick with phlegm and desperation, the impulse to look up and ask for a miracle. Urgent case in California, begins the email from the adoption agency. A woman due two days before Christmas. I picture us racing up the coast guided by starlight playing the song our son danced to  last December, parents packed shoulder to shoulder in the auditorium. He'll nod along and then he'll nod off.  His eyes look more like his birthmom's  when he's sleepy. We'll talk giddily about TV shows, high on gas station coffee. None of this comes true.  Like the Christmas story, it has been tainted  by the teller. The woman chooses  different parents for her baby. Photo by Magnus Östberg on Unsplash This year our son is obsessed with his Christmas list: night vision goggles, L.O.L. dolls, a plastic waffle maker. He has discovered the power of wishing but not, yet, its limitations, which lurk at the edge of the frame. When h...

Earlier this month, AK's mom had a stroke. The good news is that she's recovered now to the point where you wouldn't know anything had happened, but we had/have some long-term stuff to figure out related to medication and the other complexities of getting old. In the weeks when AK was helping her sister care for their mom, I did a bunch of long days (even by pandemic standards) working and parenting simultaneously with no interludes.  I think about how this time is changing my brain. I've become an efficiency monster; I use the phrase "radical pragmatism" a lot. I bark at my kid, I sigh loudly at him, I spend more time with him than I ever did. If I sit still, I think about things like the election and death, so I do laundry and corral kids and write things. I don't know if I like the new me or not.  This is not the new me. This is Natalie Lima. On Saturday, I had the house to myself for an afternoon while I participated in a humor writing workshop led by ...

Denise's mother flip-flopped onto campus in a white tennis skirt each afternoon. Smoker's cough, sun-browned legs heels a jigsaw of fissures. Her feet were a wonder to my shade-grown, eight-year-old self. Perhaps Denise's mother made a choice: tennis over moisturizer and a pumice stone. Perhaps in the hours between work and ferrying Denise to gymnastics, she had time for just one luxury. In the months between March and the relentless now, I became reacquainted with my feet. Saw them emerge from boots to meet air and driveway dirt. Was the nail on my second toe always so thick? Dozens of narrow fault lines spread across my soles, and I was helpless to stop them. I always think that knowing should save me. I knew about time and it happened anyway. It was a place where anything was possible I told someone yesterday, through my cotton face mask, referring to my work with former gang members. There was the guy who started a solar panel installation comp...

1. On my first day off in weeks I stand with my son watching a spider who has spun a web in the bamboo a floating silver blanket that has snared a ladybug. The spider pedals his back legs a busy typist or a mother preparing dinner. The ladybug yields, all squirming undercarriage her red jewel of a shell consumed by white thread. I wonder if I should intervene and what the metaphor might be. This is the week protesters stood up in the name of Black bodies and our president wielded the military in the name of the bible. I sat home, a typist, tangled scared and tired. 2. Dee Dee Blanchard named her daughter Gypsy Rose, and that's half of what you need to know. Smile, baby, she told her child after ordering a dentist to pull out her teeth. I let them entertain me. She pushed her in a wheelchair, a pink blanket over her strong legs. Gypsy stood up in the night took off her oxygen mask ate frosting by the light of the fridge looked up "kissing...

The kids are slipping and sliding on an inflatable rainbow our lawn turning to mud. We have a lawn and there must always be a pause for that: our good fortune. My boss has ideas, and these too are luxuries born in her former hunting lodge in the folds of Laurel Canyon. She watches mountain lions on webcams stalk their prey. She outlines her vision and speaks of strategy. I say I'll try. Our most famous local lion crossed two freeways to get to Griffith Park and so maybe she believes in exceptionalism as much as conservation. The kids chant their demands like labor activists and I suppose that makes me management delivering Jell-O in plastic bowls shaky and blood red. I was pregnant once but never went into labor. The years between that unbeating ultrasound and eventual adoption created a wild beast in me. It crossed freeways. It looked back at the rushing cars and saw what might have happened. Our son has formed a union with the neighbor kids ...

Friday night I met with my writing group, had a glass of wine, dug into Auzelle's poems, walked home in the humid dark, and started feeling the sparkly urge to write a poem. About the layers of being connected to and separate from another human being (are there poems about anything else?). Saturday morning, one of the moms from Dash's new school organized a pre-first-day play date so kids and parents could get to know each other, and it was nothing short of a smashing success. Every parent was friendly and chill, and the kids started a group project of Moving All The Sand From The Sandbox Out Of The Sandbox. Dash hit it off with twin boys who were adopted by two dads, and I can't tell you how excited I am that Dash won't have to do all the queer-adoptive-family explanatory lifting himself. So we're feeling pretty optimistic, and the blurry unknown is coming into focus. This morning I wrote the poem that took shape Friday night, even though Sunday morning is a di...