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Growing up in the South is like kicking a mule          to feel eternity in your bones.                    Or kicking a scarecrow, and calling it a mule.Or running your fingers over the rusted,          abandoned blade from a tractor                    in its eternal rest, and calling that a mule. You’ll call anything a mule. Lace doilies          on the dining room table, the white-suited mayor                    leaning…

we call them, that week          at our rented beach shack,with smiles equally, let’s admit,           tender and cruel.Heart, cancer, rope—          they flourished without them. Designed tiny houses.          Protested often.A month in Guatemala.            Book clubs,movie groups, wine tasting          before the play. More friends than either of us, solitary couple,          could imagine.Some old myth unfurling,           surely, before usas we haul their bright umbrellas          down…

In the piles in the backyardhe and I sat in June’s pumped-up sun, half-blinded,sifting through rocks and crystals, winter’s lump and strandsprouting thin green leaves, lobes that would turnto vine and squash and yellow in fall’s sideways light.He grabbed fistfuls with clumsy fingers, smearing themon his mouth, wanting to be in it completely. Later, he’d…

who drownedin my two fingers, denied the bittersweetness of a black- berry and nearlysurrendered to the meat of a melon, but considered,mostly, the craft of thirst or deathand tongued itself goodbye. oh, gentleness.oh, small brown float of a life. what newsshould I give your beloveds? most of them havingfollowed the rinds, which too,though I often…

Come see our siding glimmer in the sun.Our knuckles stung in bleach. All cobwebs gone.Come see our daffodils like little gods,these yellow resurrections born to nodagain in April breeze. Our vase-staged roomsare dustless as a baron’s desk. We groomedthem free of poetry (my books in binsteeter attic stacks) and snapshots of our kidsthe realtor said…

During the last days when we were waiting for herto stop being her, it felt like a holiday, a thrill in the air—rarely-seen relatives and friends coming to visit, everyone taking turns lying beside her, smelling her hair, tellingher she did everything right, was a good person and mother.When the first, faint rattle formed in…

I had come to the end of my formal schooling, my studies in history were a thing          of the past. I was in history now, just another customer at the crowded candy store, new to town, the chilly evening before Valentine’s          Day. We were packed tight as the heart-shaped boxes we’d lined up to buy, empty of…

is the indigestible triangular beak in a kaleidoscopewith other beaks in the belly of a sperm whale. Squid just prefer solitude. But here we are, wearingsquid headpieces, long iridescent tentacles down to our jeans, the two of us a rare squid family.My daughter hops over to two un-cephalopod-ed girls for hide and seek, and I…

for Mama           belly pooched like a teacakeseventeen years old           thrusttoward the congregation framedby stained glass           deacon eyesthat nicked at her legs fixon her lips as she says           i’m sorry months passthe young absent fathermumbles           sorry my mamasays i have to go to schoolhe tucks the baby’s picture in hiswallet grins           but she look just like…