Summary

In “River of Milk” the speaker begins by telling the reader “it wasn’t long ago I was brainless … so much of me then was nothing” (76). They go on to tell the story of their ancestor, a saint who controlled a river of milk beneath his town. The townspeople believed he could have saved them from a drought, and so they ripped him to pieces and buried a bag of goat bones and azalea instead of his body. “My hair still carries that scent,” the speaker says (76). They say that they told their mother they would not live through the year, “then waited for disaster,” but “this is not the story she tells hers filled/with happy myths” (77). The speaker concludes the poem by saying “you grow to love the creatures you create/some of them come out with pupils swirling others with...