Poetry

I watch them smear themselves Around the world and worry. I want them with me. To fold Them inside a garish treasure Chest that I will lower into the sea. There’s me, middling on The perfect surface of the mad Pacific While my best loves sleep Beneath, conserved, Coldbodied. Kept Souls keeping me. Their bodies…

in your best bluesy voice. I want to start over. Not at the beginning but where something takes hold that could never belong to me. Breath by the fringe of the sea, I give you back my first child-cries, the smear of world that took hold as flesh, Time with its shake-down-the-house hunger alarms, its…

Walk alive in the woods in the waking faint of Spring, on circling pathways beside a goose-honking lake, through Sapsucker Woods’ dense wetlands and forest, as a papier-mâché moon floats over mud-dried leaves, sunglare flashes chrome off the water, gold bursts of marsh marigolds rise from green tussocks, and hairy ropes of poison ivy snake…

The fridge don’t work. The milk comes out thick; when you shake the jug it sloshes heavy-footed breaking through the gospel of your grandmother’s duplex; her fridge always broke, and you always questioned why like why we gotta refrigerate in the freezer? Like why we gotta unthaw the milk for breakfast? The answer is because,…

Somebody says dig deep. Hunker down like you would in the only bed you’d ever slept. With a flannel blanket head to toe, its color-hued fort only you know, distorting the under-light. Venture back to that kingdom. It was not the fetal position; you had no need to hide. Mark the Noah’s ark measuring stick…

Make us sixteen again that February— the suburban couch of community smoke, or how, half-clothed on a wooden floor, we trace veins on our prickling arms. Ecstasy pressed with dolphins and pink ponies, sneak me out through the living room window into parking lots, under the hot sheet of a sky whose edges we don’t…

                    I’ve let men do all sorts of things to me in private. Around the corner from the Urban Garden Center chicken coop,   My block quiet, sidewalk unlit, I let a stranger turn his face to me, beg “Pardon,” his piss slapping the crease between my building and stoop.   The August night temperature matches…

I shelved books. My boss at the library started with the pay scale at local fast-food restaurants and paid me a dollar less. Each morning I waited in the little room on the other side of the return slot like a monk in his cell, peering up at the mountain through his narrow window and…

What kind of school is this? Two little girls attend the hearing. We take a recess, and the children play in the courtyard. The girls had heard of their cousin’s cruelty, his sexual assault. The girls are chatter birds on a wire, feathers oiled. They twitter back at us: liar, liar. Only a few birds…