Lisa Swanstrom
THE TOOTHACHE TREE
In summer, hunger grows like citrus fruit,
tree branches blooming into golden loops
of low-slung oranges and pears that touch
the ground to shed their swollen seeds,
suddenly lighter, as if crying could ease
the hunger in your belly, or the belly
of the one within your belly, who is not
yet a who or a him or a her, but a hunger
you cannot feed.
The flood waters came too soon this June, trees
floating out of yards like bodies to be blessed.
You will send this hunger with it too, you
think, and send it with the rain, in a box
like Moses’ mother made, to float to a woman
whose gums never bled from hunger pains.
Or you will bathe it in the mud of the toothache
tree, whose wild trunk you sent your children
to gnaw when they shed their teeth for larger teeth,
or had an ache which needed to be numbed.
Now an ache hangs heavy from the branches
of your body. Your womb grows hard
as the tree’s own wood. Angelica ash,
wild orange, the toothache tree bends brown,
its roots circling in knots of thread, kneading
into soil like gripping fingers, feeding
from the loss of what could not be fed.