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The last time I saw my fathersound and marrow-filled, he was standing on the front porch—almost the weight of a ghost. As I waved goodbyeI felt a nerve twitch— like a dog’s ear batting a fly.He never sold me the world. He never said that peopleare good. But the next morning when he stopped like…

I don’t often revisit the year I fosteredall the neighborhood strays, teenagers enticed by decay and overrunwith the lesions that wistfulness deals. I don’t often revisit the year my parentsdisappeared, but whose house we filled with smoke so indissolubleit consoled like blindness— the year pedestrians crossed the streetto avoid my yard, alive with ragwort and…

reading on the couch, your messy hairfinally beginning to gray. You arebreathing, moving moleculesof air aside, inhabitingspace that could go emptyso easily. You holda heating pad to your sidewhere I bruised your rib, clumsyin my hunger for your infinitevariety. ya’aburnee,lovers say in Arabic—you bury me.It’s quiet enoughthat I can hear the ringing alwaysin the background…

You know how lightning never lasts long enoughto get a good look at it? and your eyes do this thing,as if they could grow larger, widen out of your facetrying to see enough,longer, more— this happens also when the heron passes: too quickly.Today I lucked into seeing how richly blueare the tops of his wing-feathers….

What I got of worldly gumption I learned in the church of false assumption. Under the sentence of wrath and fire I studied the windows, the girls in the choir.