to kill the time before dinner
instead of them
I drag my kids to the park

and watch them from a bench
do what kids do: run,
the only way to live

in the body, green their knees,
stare, brazen-eyed, graze
on the words of other

children, none strange (a word
only for adults) their truth
still chartreuse and capital. 

They climb, get stuck,
the rite of unsticking
somehow, belongs only to

the first unsticker, the one
whose birth canal
they first burst through: you.

But mostly, I try to read
a book, recall how language
once lived in me, too

seedlings of vines
reaching up for sunlight
through my throat

it closes
thick, on knucklebone,
on stone

how many doors away am I
from that goddess
with the birthing tongue  

I once spoke things into being
I once could listen
the trees are hissing, full 

of insect wings in the dusk—
a crack, a glass shattering like a voice
I know—my boy

has tripped      she made me chase her
made me fall
O agony, O ancient Adam cursed, 

here is my lap, let us sit
by the power derricks
chained to the horizon 

let us listen
mommy, he says, 
you can hear the wires crackle

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s work has or will soon appear in journals such as Tar River Poetry Review, CALYX, Dialogist, SoFloPoJo, Mom Egg Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and SWWIM, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2016 through Finishing Line Press. She is the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, a Georgia native and mother of three.