Peach Preserves

The window uploads another dawn.
Black winter trees hang in the frame
like fly paper in a basement

in a movie your mother would never
let you see. An hour ahead 
in a bigger city, men are already 

being assholes. Their daughters’ 
white legs like the throats of swans 
are just now unfolding out of bed covers

little no’s still developing in their mouths
birds preparing to fly from their middle
fingers. Their faces are painted over

the sisters who came before them
with fathers who woke early, peed loud 
enough to be heard from another decade, 

tied their ties and left for work. Time 
to make another law to hold down the heat
like a nurse restrains a patient, love

left at home, a plant that knows
it can grow only in certain zones,
a girl born with fingers on white

keys, we see her in a still life
through a hole in the fence. A fine
wife holds down an armchair with her

heavenly body as her daughter sings
a song over the recording of a song,
before central air, when heat was 

the great leveler, canned fish 
on a cold plate. They drink tea from 
the teapot painted on the blue bird.

Elizabeth Hughey is the author of two poetry collections: Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press) and Guest Host (National Poetry Review Press).  She is the co-founder and programming director at the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, Alabama, where she teaches poetry in the public schools. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Open Letters Monthly and Tinderbox Poetry Journal.