Athena Kildegaard: Allurement

My son calls to tell me
he held the two rabbits
he’d raised and was
about to kill close
to his chest, their hearts
racing, his heart full
of the blood of necessity
and qualm, his heart
filled with a song
of holy lullaby
to calm the creatures,
their warm bodies pulsing
against his, and I think,
as he falls silent on the phone,
that he will, some day—I’m
sure of it—make a good father.

Athena Kildegaard: Untitled

I thought, when I was twenty, that when I turned
fifty, I’d be immune to love’s vicissitudes,
and here I am at fifty, indoors, peeling the skin
of a beet, my fingers bloody seeming, and I’m
watching you outside with our grown daughter,
her back’s to me, she could be me, something
about how she leans forward from her shoulders.
All those years ago, what was it we argued about
so fiercely I crossed the Michigan Avenue bridge,
the Wrigley Building white and tranquil behind us,
but we couldn’t let it go, couldn’t walk away, we
hollered across the traffic. Even now I can feel
my spine lengthen, my shoulders square back,
a little ferocity hardening me. I finish the beets
and lean toward the screen, as if to hear what you
and she say to one another, how you work it out.