for the forest’s basal area, the area
in square feet at the cross-section at breast
height of a single tree. See the tangerine
walls bleeding around the mirror where
my sister and I compare our teenage breasts,
perplexed by these new signs of likeness
and difference—the blue-green veins and dusty-
pink nipples, the size, the shape, the weight of fat
hanging over the ribcage, each breast its own
iteration of earth’s atomic speech. O see
the women directed to stand beside the pines,
their breasts pendulous as plastic bags or firm
as rubber, breasts pointing to every star
on the compass, breasts purple, pitch, or parakeet
green, chests zipped shut with scars, with heavy dashes
where breasts once “O”ed the world open, ballooned
with milk or held in the mouth of love, breasts off-
centered, oblong, amorphic, breasts like two
barely raised dots read by moving the hand
across a page, breasts with faces bent or raised
like nuns toward the unseen, breasts like
snippers, their gaze level, each nipple an eye,
a scope through which the body aims. See
the foresters mark where the tissue meets
the rash-red bark, see the machine calculate
the meeting and print basal, blazon,
a blaze on the USDA report page.
