Pica

A pregnant woman painting
by Alexia Lound

Pica

If she craves clay or chalk, or coal, she should be given
cooked beans with sugar.--- Tortula


I
She drove the Honey-bun delivery van
well into her ninth month.
What she wanted to get hot off the rack;
coffee cakes, cake doughnuts, sweet rolls.
That cake, she says, brought my grandmother's
house right into my mouth. Yellow, yellow
as a kitchen in the fifties.
Her eyes glaze.
No one could stop her from dunking for comfort
as she drove.
Her tiny frame took the weight
in sweet elastic rolls.
Dough, she sighs, egg-dough--
that's what I made my girl of.

II
Water calls them to the edge
to watch the wash and smell how
earth gives in, suffuses, makes them flare
at damp spring scent from underground.
Dry horses can follow their noses miles and miles
to what they need.
It's that old instinct asserted early in pregnancy;
see them down by the lake,
women walking by the marshy margin of the bed;
hungry women with one appetite,
women up early
to bend and touch mud to their tongues,
women out to eat the world.


Heid E. Erdrich.......from The Mother's Tongue