Nina C. Peláez

Motherland

after Sally Mann

‍

The body is not a body, though you could braid

the choking vines cascading down the back, upturn

the skirt-bark hugging the hull of her, as many

are wont to want to. History recommends a woman

know how to be a tree: blood pumped to phloem,

hands broken into brittle branches, orifices

callused closed with wound-wood. I learn the word

for the way wood will try to heal the cut: cicatrix,

marked where some part detached, navel-knotted

burl left on limb, furrowing felled parts, where fruit

or fetus once unfurled. If my mother were a tree,

then she might be the last one standing: field’s-edge,

somewhere South. Sepia sky only starting to shadow.

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