This morning’s hothouse: a pornography. All my darlings pressing up to watch My fan-dance, velvet spathe flourishing Open to my hidden plush. I will peel down To my inmost creases for you, and your camera Will snap and whine, but we both know You’re not after some glossy shot For your desktop botanical. What you…
We were arguing about children. I was pleading, "Something could be done, stars could be fixed above their hands–" And then a star-shaped pattern of skin in a surgical basin. To be fixed to every child’s face, ironed over it like a wrapper.
If you lifted the “house” from “housewife” it would not be such a bad job, not partnered to rooms or dust, but to the man, the small burden of laughing at repeated jokes. Who wouldn’t admire the woman’s shining competence at love and accommodation? The lineaments of practiced ardor? Yes, there’s abnegation, but wife burns….
It is the not knowing that keeps us going, the way we turn the pages of a book. We don’t know which October will bring hurricanes and which will bring the bright Conchs that hold open our doors. We don’t know whether the Blue Heron is pensive on his big stick legs or if he…
Your green Arcadian hills do not interest me. The bird-bright eyes of every bird cared for, the way it is promised, the way it is written, everyone fat on their share of sun and seed. But I don’t see you in the dark streak of a cat crossing the street or the regal skunk in…
What might it be worth, this memento of my parents’ fifty-year marriage set in a diamond and sapphire crown, too large, too gaudy for my taste? I pass it under the partition to the jeweler who holds it to the light, then under the stern eye of his loupe. (Do you see it, young man?…
They return in my father’s ghostly sailboat, never steady, and in spring when my body is like a maple tree. Their purpose is to imagine the life we did not choose. One lives in a house with a cat, mountains in the distance. Their job is to tend my younger self: that other body. One…
World, I honor you. After everything we’ve been through I honor you and take you with me up the mountainside where we will live in wonderment. I take you to the desert where we shrivel like worms and become tongues for other people to kiss with. World, there are two baskets on my back. Fill…
In the tenement of the body generations have left their mark. On the stairwell of bones and the walls of flesh illegible words are scrawled in invisible ink. Windows look down on concrete gardens where live buds force themselves from sticks of trees. The genes are doing their scheduled work. Clutch the banister, hold on…
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