Sita

She was found at a construction site off 376, unearthed by a backhoe,
naked kicking infant with no mother but the dirt she breathed,
skin the color of red clay.

When she was seven, homing pigeons taught her to sing,
began to bring her unsigned letters written in scripts she could not read
and their paper was always sun-warm in her hands, smelled like sandalwood.
She bundled letters in stacks of one hundred and eight tied together with ribbon
and when she placed them under her pillow at night she had dreams
of snakes, bonfires, and little boys with elephant heads,
and they touched her like she was sister or mother.

When she was twenty four she married a man who said
he had been born from the sky, fallen to earth like a sheet of paper
and like paper he would slice at her fingertips. At night
she held her bundled letters, sat in bed and ran her fingers
over their warmth. Her husband watched through half-closed eyes
one evening, watched her touch ink-dusted fingers to her lips,
watched her body sigh at the taste and each day that followed
he looked for the men with twenty arms and ten tongues to devour her,
to whisper to him a list of places they had desired her;
post office, coffee shop, or crosswalk.

twenty seven mad days and he took the stacks of paper
from beneath her pillow to make a pyre of them in the yard.
Sticks and logs collapsed into ash and the paper remained
only as warm as the sunlight.  Sita watched him from the bedroom window,
looked down at her hands, thread-thin cuts he had left.
That night she walked out onto the front lawn, robed and barefoot,
she walked into the streets, out to the highway and into the trees. 

She put her cheek to the earth and it cradled her, whispered,
Mother, mother.