Early Lessons in Care

A bean in a cup,
a burst
of guppies, a lizard
shuffled around the class for household overnights,
then raffled 
off. Neon sashes for a four-foot traffic
cop,

just say 
no,
et cetera, a plastic infant 
embedded with a microchip, 
disturbingly
realistic in its weight and punctuation of
distress.

It was the year of the sixteen bomb
threats,
the year I wouldn’t eat unless I was
alone, which meant 
late at night, cold chicken greasing the heel 
of my fist, vanilla 
ice cream in a shot
glass.

Then I smoked a joint or two and trudged home in
the snow,         
read some Kierkegaard for school,
charred snickerdoodles in a toaster oven on another edge 
of the world, sipped
bitter

coffee at a stranger’s
funeral,
slunk through checkpoints, wept 
goodbye in the rattletrap 
bequeathed by a deported 
Catalan human rights monitor, paring myself 
down

again until I stopped. And
now,
sowing my life into a lakebed,
volcano-flanked,
belly soft,
loved, smack-dab in the middle of a planetary study on
air,

I let the bread 
grow
in the bowl of itself.
The bread means 
breath, means pleasure, means nothing, perfect, just
enough —

I don’t even know what else to
say
about it, okay, it’s 
a bean 
in a cup.

ξ

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator of both poetry and prose. Her poems have recently appeared in the Yale Review, Annulet Poetics Journal, Moist Poetry Journal, and the North American Review, among other publications. She writes a monthly column on poetry translation for Palette Poetry.