Anastasia K. Gates

The Breeding of Wolves

I was taught to corral the wolves

The one with the pale gray fur was mine 

I named her after a coast in Antarctica 

The divinity of a claw like glacial ice 

Starker than our whips and morning stars

They were bred to bid away the archangels

Their mere bark a sterling shield

When the hand burns the trees pure white

And leaves a beloved’s teeth in the garden—

This I call the howling hours

And yet, what is known of dark matter?

Cut open a parsnip and what do you see—

Our horses, who menstruate from spring to autumn

And know my blood as precisely as water 

Canter and rub their musk into my neck

The wolves plead for the predestined dark

But a gravid horse is ever watchful—

The fire that cannot be put out

I take them by the headful in my palms

And press their foreheads, coldly, to my lips

Chokecherry

When I saw my auntie, she had a gash in her cheek.

Her husband came home drunk that afternoon

And held the blade of a carving knife to her face.

That was when I noticed her missing finger—

Sawed down into a thimble. 

She said the lid of the piano had fallen upon it

While she played what impregnates the females—

They were the family who bred the wolves

And saved me the star-white kit.

But it was underneath a bench in the garth 

When it collapsed and broke its neck.

Wolves bury their dead and linger on its plot

Before covering their tracks in the snow.

Did she hide her finger in the back of the closet

And watch it become the phantom of a woman?

She told me she hears the keys being tapped

When she stuffs chokecherry branches down a vase

Or steps partway through the frame of a door.

Starfruit

The starfruit tree belongs to Godmother—
Standing in her land alone, caparisoned by fertility.

It prepares to undress its frenzy of ornaments—
Each heptagram hangs in anatomical intricacy

Globose and bending in golden ratio.
But the children climb into the boughs at night 

And steal all the fruit before they drop—
She wakes to find it barren by trickery.

I wonder if she ever sits at her table
While she slices the fruit open—

Bleeding triumphantly onto her apron
And presses it against her tongue until it curdles.

She tells me how her husband once strayed 
As the fruit cupped by the palm of the night.

How it left her sore at the hip
As though an unfound person were lodged inside. 

That is why there was a space 
Folded neatly between their four children.

Perhaps this had been a warning
A stone that nearly breaks one’s teeth.

The Bromeliad

The landscape of the eternal rests upon her—

As a girl, Mama was taught how to hunt 

For pandanus leaves, draped under the sun 

Until burnt gold—her hair is as copper 

As a copperhead, as we walk past 

The fruit bat cemetery and into the mangrove—

Banyan trees dig into the darklight water 

As we do when bathing in the river—

We lay under the shade and fan the body 

Of one another from heat—

She smells of an older earth, underground 

What’s one thing you would change, I ask her

The answer wrung in her fingers

Severing the cord of motherhood

She plaited a crown for me before I left— 

Of blood lily and torch flower 

I watch it wilt—nature carrying itself away

She presses the bromeliad against her cheek—

Knowing this will be its only bloom

The House Marked with a Shark Fin

The umbilical-colored octopus induced the fever—

Killed for my homecoming on the island.

What is unsettled enters the bloodstream—

A poisoning that lit the night in the yard. 

My papa ordered my eldest sister to nurse me

When she was deep in her pregnancy—

He would come home drunk each night 

And fall asleep outside my bedroom door 

Hollering something in moonshine and oil.

She named her baby after me—

Craning into my sickbed, she wouldn’t show her teeth.

About the Author

Anastasia K. Gates is a writer, poet, and artist from Pennsylvania. She is a Poetry candidate at Columbia University in the City of New York.