We knew which trees were going to die,
not by the shape of their leaves, but by the purple
traps that tagged their branches. My mother
taught us that the emerald ash borer smuggled
itself into our country in packing crates
aboard foreign ships. Each Missions Sunday,
she’d pierce the map’s skin
with another pushpin, a red string
stretching out from our church
to each of its mission fields: Madagascar,
Uganda, Pakistan. What began
as a star turned into a spider
& then something darker, malignant:
a bright red blotch. At night, the beetles
would slip their eggs beneath the bark
of our backyard’s ash. It takes ten years
for the emerald beetles to reduce a region’s trees
to memory. By the time I return home, all the ash
will be gone. When our neighbors
the Ashes woke to their house burning down,
I couldn’t sleep for a week, terrified
that a name could hold that much weight.
After I married my husband, I changed
mine, left my father’s behind. As it ages,
the ash tree can change itself from male
to female. Once, as a boy, I slid my fingers
into the tree’s grooved skin,
through the maze of scars the beetles
left behind. One landed on my wrist, a jewel
of a certain color—but when it stretched its wings
to fly away, the light flashed against
its rubied abdomen. Even the most beautiful thing,
out of place, can become a knife. Every night
my mother kneels by her bed & prays
for that part of me we can’t unname
to pass away. On Sundays, when my father
asks for prayer requests from the altar,
she calls out, I have a son I have a son
I have a son I have an unspoken.