Emily Hillebrand

Ode

            after Ellen Bryant Voigt

In 1918 they had begun unravelling infectious diseases, chasing clues
about bad air. Radiators were built to run with windows open and still 

sweat us out, vestigial organs that heaved the same warm breaths
into the lungs of our grandmothers. My own died shy  

of that pandemic’s centennial, and until this year, there was no day
I wanted to live without them. But it seems kinder  

that they are not here to see how low we sink
when time plugs the drain. Would they have courted  

their own deaths? One was a Christian Scientist who loved like breathing
and thought her cancer came from sin. The other was a Catholic

who loved like duty and stopped speaking three months before she died.
They were straw-haired and strait-laced, women who stood upright  

at kitchen windows and banished bad humors in steaming water I
was not allowed to touch. When does childhood end? When the tap 

scalds and your hands are unscathed? When the heat comes on
I sing into dry and empty air, gather my ghosts from the cold.

Written by Herself

            after Gregory Pardlo

I was born in midnight in a traveling fair the Ferris wheel
engineering the wind. I was born to lichen and lard;
I was born on another moon where I
was borrowed with ribbons, a fallow mare,
photonegatives in my pockets. I came home to churches
bordering the dead-end street, my strings cut,
shoes weighed with semolina and sunlight.
I was born blue and mountainous; I bore an accidental origin.
I gave fright, I gave lark, I gave rise to desire.
I was born feckless in a current of jelly-fished water,
water salted like licks and ionized particles.
I was born a riddle and a problem and a calling card;
I was an article preview on JSTOR when I was born.
I was born amidst deer in a graveyard crying
can you see me? and a sister I was born
to this codex of winters, this time halt I was
born with an abstract of synonyms, haunted
by half-lives and liars, I was born leaning
over the reflection pool of the nineties: I was born.
I built graveyards before I could build houses;
I walked long in my mother’s love before I was born.