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Erin Koehler
Identifying the Ruby-throated Hummingbird
I spent my twentieth summer thinking about beardtongue
& the benign polyp in my mother’s colon.
I diagnosed the problem: eating
too much of her father’s rhubarb without
any sugar. It wasn’t diabetes that snapped his heart—
the dark jewels on his skin were to blame. The black
masses growing like when I was thirteen & fed
my Venus flytraps dead pool insects. Their bodies
slow-wilted, soft & the flies came at last
to the mold-tomb bodies of chlorinated
nectar. It was my mother who found him & folded
his foxglove eyelids—
& when her children went to college, she still drank
on her own, a gallon of milk a week.
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