Winged Vessel

—Biggs Museum of American Art

Shaped like a kidney, marbled and starry, this wooden bowl reminds me
of the dish a nurse once packed into my things. Unable to divine its truth or

how to use it with my baby, I stuffed its sweet lobes full of cotton balls.
Its confidence made me doubt myself, aware I was a guesser. But I hung onto

that clown-mouthed dish, for it ferried the people of Fisher Price
across four states one bathtub at a time, passively reinventing itself,

penny holder, hamster john, spinning its principal story: the night I had
contractions while I gazed up at the stars. Each primal wave fanned out

a billion years. “We are 4.6 billion-year-old carbon!” blares my son, so
certified as ancient. He loves to hear the astrophysicist say The SETI group

will not give up its search for rocky planets orbiting stars. Forty years they've
scanned the skies for intelligence, a fluke of circumstance star-forged

just as Julian is, tough chunk of carbon whose questions fling him
through the world. He meteors his body onto the couch, pinches blossoms

from my potted orange, my parallel Florida universe. He finger-grinds
their fragrance out. Wonders, "How do oranges come from tiny flowers?"

A seventeenth-century scientist left behind a recipe: Place one dirty garment
in a glass vessel. Add two fresh ears of wheat. Wait twenty-one days

to ferment. On that day, mice will appear. See? Life from scratch. So many
sad Dollys by now. When there's already so much life underneath our skins.

In Germany, some doctors grew in the muscle of a patient's back a bone
tailored to fill the gap they'd carved nine years before, digging cancer

from his jaw. It fit—like the perfect day fits an open door, when you take off
through the woods to scout a burl whose eye meets yours, when words

well into worlds not here before. This galaxy carved from a maple scar
holds nebulae, holds light that burned in newborn stars. No wonder our hands

yield healing force. And when his face lights up, I'm tugged by my son's
gravity, while Earth spins a thousand miles an hour or so, and nature lays

a jewel inside a wound. No wonder the German patient, who could finally
Halleluiah chew told his nurses, Bring me a bratwurst! What a luscious

otherworldly universe that brat must've been, in sourdough no less—think
of it. Curved like the kidney dish. Curved like this Winged Vessel. Curved

like time and space.






Click here to listen to JoAnn Balingit reading "Winged Vessel"

JoAnn Balingit’s work has appeared in Salt Hill Journal, Smartish Pace, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere, including the anthologies DIAGRAM.2 and Best New Poets 2007. Her chapbook, Your Heart and How It Works, is forthcoming from Spire Press. She has served as Delaware’s poet laureate since 2008 and teaches poetry in schools and community organizations throughout the state.