Rebecca Foust

HIS FIRST DEATH*

He died when he was born
for ten or more seconds
while I drew in three long breaths.
The hand pump hissed
and his face was dusk. I dreamed
the dreams mothers dream
for their first sons—kick and suck,
pupils that tighten in sunlight,
stand, walk and run. Act-out
and talk-back, eye met by eye,
roll in wet grass. Three beats
passed. His Dixie-cup chest
inflated, then crumpled. I drew in
and released my own great
useless lung loads, each profligate breath.

ALTOONA TO ANYWHERE*

Go ahead, aspire to transcend
your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap
the life you dream on,
escape the small-minded tyranny
of your mountain bound
coal mining town.

But when you've left it behind, you
may find it still there, in your dreams,
in your syntax, the smell of your hair,
its real smell under the shampoo.
Beware DNA. It will out or be outed,
and youll find yourself back
where you started, back home, unable
to refute the logic of blood and bone,
you'll slip, and pick up the Velveeta
instead of the brie. It's inexorable.
Kansas one day will turn out to be Oz
and Oz Kansas,

with the same back porch weeping,
the same husbands sleeping around,
addiction, cancer, babies born wrong.
The same siren nights pierced
with stars seeping light, all that
gorgeous, pitiless song.

* "His First Death," first published in the Atlanta Review, "Altoona to Anywhere" first published in Dos Pasos Review, are both reprinted in All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving 2010)."

Rebecca Foust's books Dark Card and Mom's Canoe won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Awards. Her full length collection, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, won last year's Many Mountains Moving Book Award and was published in 2010. Also released in 2010 is God, Seed (Tebot Bach Press), environmental poems and art from which this selection was taken. Her poetry has won several distinctions and has been published or is forthcoming from Atlanta Review, Hudson Review, JAMA, Margie, North American Review, Nimrod and others.