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On reprieve           from the rain but not the heat—   we watch it           gather like flowers or the men who build   a house in fits           & starts across the street.   They saw           & nail what I can’t see—a coffin   cut to measure,           or wedding dress sewn closed   along the pinked seams….

Of us there is           always less. The days hammer   past, artificial daisies           at the grave. Words I didn’t choose   for my father’s headstone           & those that came instead to live around my neck,   dog tags a tin           pendulum on my chest. On my mother’s side,   my cousin, too young,           dirt a…

What does           the water want? Enters where   it is not           welcome, jacks up the foundation   uneven           & splits the wood like a look—   it rusts           it rusts rusts the roof through—   drops by unannounced           when your house a mess, rifles through Mama’s   drawers, papers, borrows           books for weeks & returns…

Quarter-glass in the dawn-light’s mottled hyphen. The risk of it, the resistance. I stitched the mask from lathered skins. Motes of flour in the bakery’s apse. I breathe like the machine I am, I proof the stubborn yeast. Nectar of planished faces articulating the angles: of self, of theology, of the spaces recently occupied by…

Then happiness became an egg that broke across our table. Fragments of shell through which yolk pooled to placemats: bright goopy gold that filled loose napkin folds as if all I could wish for from luck. My three-year-old pulls himself up alongside to mash peas on his tray and meow at my hand and command…

A white cat has come to sit on the backside of slaughter,           To sit on a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates. The cat has come not as any witness to a crucifixion           Or a coronation, not as angel or symbol of some comfort Creature, some benign break in the dying,           But as human…

She was old, my mother, and dead now, or so they said, and I could think of nothing but boiling pots of water.   Out the window, November’s birds pecking the dry grass.   More and more water I boiled, watching it hiss and spit, roil and seethe.   She was old, my mother, and…

All I ever needed to bring up with her was cranberries. She brightened no one’s eyes; I befriended her frown. Bogs, she says, when I rhyme fog. Bone-chilling overcast, she affirms damply. Wouldn’t you like to slip away from your burned house and head to the cold coast, even if they have to search for…