Cradleboard

Chris Ellery

April 16, 2023

Almost twelve, fostered from age four.

Everyone knows she’s not right. 

Her nights have eyes.

She screams. She runs away. 

She wears only black, not knowing it 

the color of change. 

Today with Mrs. Berry’s class 

she attends the past,

the Mayer Museum at Angelo State. 

T-Rex, trilobites, raptor eggs, mammoth bones, 

the wide-open jaws of megalodon 

swallowing classmates six at a time. 

Through ice, volcanoes, meteorites, 

through epochs and eons, 

she passes 

with etherized indifference. 

She sleepwalks into a room of color—

flocks of waterfowl dead and mounted,

crystal, silverware, amethyst vases, 

walls and walls of paintings, 

yet though she is fond of art 

(her macabre ink drawings worry her therapist), 

no vision in that whole bright hall 

can enter her eyes.

Like a mouse in a maze, 

she heads upstairs. Frontier days 

are on display. Tack and saddles. 

Wooden teeth. A chamber pot.

Medical tools—bone saw, scalpel, forceps. 

A basin used by a prostitute.

Suddenly something calls to her—

an infant’s cry, 

which she alone can hear. 

She stops, turns, 

stands fossilized, staring down 

at a Native American cradleboard.

Little more than a weathered plank 

with rawhide bands 

to hold the swaddled papoose. 

Though frayed and soiled, the straps 

that held it to a woman’s back 

still show a loving skill with beads.

The girl, transfixed, stares and stares, 

gazes at that cedar board until she becomes 

the baby there, searching 

with her newborn eyes 

a hundred years for Mother, 

her mother 

beaten, raped, forsaken, lost—

lost to war, to meth, to choices made—

woman’s terror and woman’s pain 

living in her, bearing her 

toward the blood 

of motherhood. 

The bus is loading. 

Mrs. Berry seeks and finds 

the girl still there, silent,

stoic as wood, apparently emotionless,

except for tears 

streaking her stony face.

Chris Ellery is a translator, essayist, and poet whose books include The Big Mosque of Mercy and Canticles of the Body. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, the Betsy Colquitt Award, and the Texas Poetry Award. Contact him at ellerychris10@gmail.com.