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Sara Moore Wagner

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Invasive Spotted Lanternfly Close to Ohio Border

It’s a mirror of a lantern,
it hangs over the garden,
sways back and forth on the finger
of the fern, outstretched. Semi-
translucent, wrapped in red, crimson
as the bottom of a well in the morning,
lit up. It echoes the ladybug, that little
red baby, state insect of Ohio. When
our children go out in the morning, they
capture it in a cup, bring it
to their grandmother who warns them
a ladybug eats the aphids and in the winter,
it sleeps. Not this beast who pierces
the foliage until the plant starts to leak,
spilling itself over the leaves. And when
something spills and no one cleans it up,
the mold—the rot. Loss, ruin, end—words
the children understand. Think
of all the ornamental trees, apples,
peach, all these mothers who carry
gifts and fling them into the yard full
of little seeds or fat stones, as we
are. Children, you carry your own fat
stones wrapped with meat. Be careful
what you bring.

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Tableau Vivant

Around the table in the coffee shop, we are mothers,
wire and cord, we live inside ourselves and in our bodies.

We pull our babies up to our laps and sway, the room is awake,
it breathes with us and we say, isn’t it nice to be in it together.

Maybe one day we’ll have arms so skinny, the whole world will move
through them, we’ll stand next to each other, filter

every sound into this living table where we sit and say how beautiful
you look, so thin. We carry pictures on our phones

of the airbrushed woman we could be, her pores so clear we can see through
her like the window in the coffee shop where our children stand, looking out.

No one orders food, we put empty spoons to our mouths
over and over, we carry empty coffee cups—

Can’t you see what’s happening to me, we say,
pointing to the bags beneath our eyes, the lines

forming on this round table, how polite we have grown,
how we push everything down like hair into a drain.

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Yarn

When I carried you
inside me like chickweed
in a garden, I was 25 and just
learning to save my money,
to have a bank account, to vomit
quietly into a trashcan, to hold
onto my receipts. On the long flight
back from Korea, alone
with you in my swollen belly,
I imagined what would happen
if you were born then,
in that stuffy airplane aisle, miles
above the ocean stretching
out below us like a tarp.
What you might see
in a mother like me. I
teeter over the edge of every
wing— hold so tight onto girlhood
my knuckles and teeth crack. And then,
how I’d rock you, newborn, in your grandma’s
basement where we lived after, where
you slept beneath the slant of window
in a pack ‘n play and I’d slip out
my nipple from your blistered gums
to force in droplets of vitamin D.
We were both so yellow:
you, jaundiced and I as tender
as an old bruise. Baby, we learned
to sleep again, next to each other,
your fingers tight around my finger
or tangled in my hair.
I’d wear you strapped to my chest
and even when you weren’t next to me,
I’d smell you on my shirt, your sweat
and spit up so fresh my breasts
would swell with milk and longing.
You learned to speak so early,
your pink cheeks puffing out words
like broccoli, froggy, love. And then,
you learned to read.
You were a child carried through the sky
and I was a girl learning to dress you
right, to bake, to feed you.
I didn’t know how to stay
anywhere or with anyone
before you. I would leave
the country, my mother—
This is all to say I know what I lost
when I took us out of that little world
where you’d sleep at the foot
of my bed while I studied for the GRE
with a tiny light to not wake you. Where
your little blonde head would be above
me like a sun each morning. I see you
miss it as I do. Before your sisters
and stepfather wake it’s just us and we lay
together on the couch, your feet
in my lap, your face. The mornings
unravel and outside at the bus stop,
your steps get wider, you take two steps
at a time. You’ve stopped waving
out the window. How empty the sky
is now. How full this life. I thought
we had more time.

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Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Poet Lore, Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review, and The Fairy Tale Review, among others. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart prize, and Best of the Net. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com.

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