Let’s begin with bark beetles, sugar pines and sap. I am twelve,

and as high as I can get in the tree behind our double-wide

mobile home. I’m peeling bark back by my bare hands
to see bug tracks, small iris-like engravements canyoned

into the tree’s meat like a secret message or a promise

from the maker of trees: Your eye will not purple
like your mother’s. Her cries are faint from this lofty height —

breezy, though more shrill than moan. My aunt has a soft whine

when she’s dragged by her hair down a hallway. I don’t cry
for her or for my mother. I’m too scaly to know

that the tree’s diseased, that these gnawings are evidence.

    Sarah Jones is our December Poet in Residence.


    Previously: Relish.