Poetry

During the last days when we were waiting for her to 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, telling her she did everything right, was a good person and mother. When the…

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…

is the indigestible triangular beak in a kaleidoscope with other beaks in the belly of a sperm whale.   Squid just prefer solitude. But here we are, wearing squid 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 Mama           belly pooched like a teacake seventeen years old           thrust toward the congregation framed by stained glass           deacon eyes that nicked at her legs fix on her lips as she says           i’m sorry     months pass the young absent father mumbles           sorry my mama says i have to go to school he tucks…

Tell me again how when you met her she was kind, she was capable, tell me how you begat a pack of us then took us to an overblown hill to ski, flimsy poles betraying a hope absurd in the face of the imminent accidents, the potential breakage. Tell me how willing we were, young,…

on the sidewalk. The sky was blue back then, the road empty. Today, a smoke cloud lingers   from fires burning elsewhere, and when I look out the window the sun burns a perfect red hole   through the sky. Looking at it now, I can’t help but be taken back there, to the end…

Wisteria sinensis     thick as a wrist, wrapped around brick,           or pine, or some other living thing:   it’s not suffocation if it’s also beautiful.           It is not invasive if it also heralds spring.   All winter you waited for the creeping           vine to burst forth, earlier than trumpet.   The purple of early…

It’s beautiful to be glad to see a person every time you see them, as I was to see Juan, the maintenance man, with whom it was always the same brotherly greeting—each of us thumping fist over heart, and grinning, as though we shared a joke, or bread. I barely knew him. Evenings in clinic,…

The cardinal at my window     sings                     year-round,                 does not migrate                                       or shed her colors, builds an open cup from parched grass and the hair she plucks     from the dog’s bristled ear,                                                     cannot bear the sight of her own face reflected in the pane—…