Nativity

My family is a shore never reached.
My family is supernatural,
like a primitive legend, or higher math.
My family crops up in historical tales.
My family is a scent I can’t detect.
My family is a lissome direct object.
My family likes the chase.
My family favors the edges of continents.
My family is laid to waste—
and all of our reasons.
My family is an occasional sense of mission.
My family is the tidal rhythm of conversation.
My family is always moving—in pulse rates,
dreaminess, a taste for salt. It won’t keep still.
My family is an abandoned sanctuary.
My family looms in my periphery.
My family collects pretty stones on walks.
My family is a study in metabolic contrasts.
My family can’t escape without looking back.
My family appears in hundreds of photos
I don’t know what to do with.
My family rakes it in. My family loses it all.
My family is a form of logic
based on bucking up and bearing down.
My family lapses into silence.
My family prefers Scotch.
My family wanders like lambs
through the empire’s domain.
My family doesn’t fall sway.
My family is beyond belief.
My family sleeps soundly
and spends the morning in pajamas.
My family sticks to its guns.
My family is a dialectics of rhyme and reason.
My family becomes an all too common tragedy.
My family at this moment shows love.
My family is used. My family shines through.
My family holds me in its arms. My family lets me go.

© Megan Harlan. All Rights Reserved.

Published in Mapmaking (BkMk Press/New Letters), 2010, and American Poetry Review, 2009.