Poetry

I could speak on a hotter than fire riot time and a woman tying up her Detroit promises in a rag. The prodigal child arriving in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—hopefully to sing freedom if only for one day. The migration head swallowing its tail in the year of my birth. I’m telling the truth when I…

So, God takes your child by the hand and pulls her from her deathbed. He says: “Feed her, she is ravenous.” You give her fruits with thick hides —pomegranate, cantaloupe— food with weight, to keep her here. You hope that if she eats enough the light and dust and love which weave the matrix of…

How fitting that he should come back as blues, the whole panoply from indigo to ultramarine on two wings, as cows lumbered up the swale to a hilltop pasture, the sun sunk behind the now truly named Blue Ridge, the world in deepening shadow. How perfect that he should come back as a butterfly, and…

on daddy’s farm, the stallions we snared and stormed into dirt would rear high to stuff their mouths with sun, buck to kick stars out of sky. rope and spur seared servitude’s lesson through muscle and bone till they broke beneath brand. sometimes, i would stoop far and slow in front of them, low enough…

One morning the people of the capital awoke to dozens of bronze statues: in front of parliament, a horse and rider both the size of Great Danes; behind the concert hall, a waif in a tutu on a tree stump playing a huge violin. In the library lobby, a creature with a low forehead, protruding…

   My husband said he felt human again   after days of stomach flu, made himself French toast,                                        then lay down again to be sure.                      I took our daughter to the zoo, where she stood on small flowered legs, transfixed by the drone                                                          of the Howler monkey,                                        a sound more retch…

one robin, one yellow willow love braving the rain on the wrong highway— honestly, I don’t know what to think! a Canada goose, a headlong cloud Open the window! under my hand, your wet skin you looking? thirty April mornings one white tulip, one red one precise interior one persistent stem 2 cherry blossom, silver…

When I was ten (no, younger than that), my mother tried to kill herself (without the facts there can’t be faith). One death or another every day, Tanqueray bottles halo the bed and she won’t wake up all weekend. In the myth book’s color illustration, the poet turns around inside the mouth of hell to…

Percussion at bedtime! A fist-sized rock, well-aimed, wrecked two windowpanes and missile-cruised my living room, bestowing transparent sharpness; ricocheted; reposed on a walnut bookshelf thick with history (the Black Jacobins, class war in ancient Greece). Glittering quills adorned a potted palm. The projectile excited scrutiny: its mongrel shape lopsided— round, then sharp; its colors muddy,…