Breech Baby
How nonsensical to fear small spaces,
and to feel, even in the most mundane situations,
the panic of being buried alive,
gasping for oxygen, craving daylight
in dark theaters, anxious in airplanes,
wide-eyed drama in crowds, and so
I seek out park land, inhabit aisle seats, avoid
elevators, instead negotiating stairwells deep
in the bowels of buildings where the trash bins
are kept. I suspect it all began
on a sultry morning in 1964 near Waikiki beach,
surfers navigating turquoise pipelines,
scaley coconut palms reaching for cloud shadows
sliding slowly down the flank of Diamond Head.
Me, stuck fast in the hot narrow birth canal,
caught between two elements for too long --
and it was there, my first breaker of dread,
following which I turned a flaccid blue
and slipped out feet first, senseless as an angelfish,
lips puckered gravely, quivering in the bright.
Tree of Forgive
I planted a pine tree on my mother’s body, decorated
it with her criticisms, reminders and entreaties
all written on bits of paper that dangled like pine cones
from the tips of it’s branches: “Can’t you just once
in your life take responsibility?” “You look like a hooker!”
“How dare you talk back to me!” Owls would roost
there, and squirrels raced past each other up and down
the rough bark, scolding if I came too close. So,
I let it grow wild, never trimmed it’s branches,
nor swept up the needles that fell copiously to the ground
like rusty fur. My mother’s words too became tattered
and faded as they made their way up the trunk
higher and higher as the tree stretched skyward,
so I could barely make out the white fluttering shapes.
The more years went by, the more bristling,
crooked, and gnarled it became. It was even a bit stooped
at the top and at night I would hear it bend
and groan, mornings breathe in its sharp clean scent.
One November there was a terrible storm,
the tree cracked to its core, topmost branches crashing
to the ground where I found them the next day broken,
motionless like corpses. I gathered up all the shriveled
slips of paper in my arthritic fingers, put on my bifocals
and looked at the barely legible words I didn’t recall
writing: “I was afraid to show affection!”, “Forgive me!”,
and:”Look at that moon! Did you ever see so many stars?”
Christina Frei grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada and has been living as an ex-pat with her family since 2001, both in Senegal, and the Netherlands. Her poetry has been published in Red River Review, Turbulence Magazine, Bareback, Apple Valley Review, the Inflectionist Review, Kansas City Voices and Sterling Magazine, and Jersey Devil Press, Illya’s Honey, Emerge Literary Journal, and upcoming issues of Freshwater, and New Millennium Writers. She has recently been nominated for Best of the Net 2013, a 2015 Pushcart prize and a Best New Poets award.