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 wantto start over. Not at the beginningbut where something takes hold thatcould never belong to me. Breathby the fringe of the sea, I give you backmy first child-cries, the smear of worldthat took hold as flesh, Time with itsshake-down-the-house hungeralarms, its eyelid of darkthat even now closes over mewith…

Walk alive in the woodsin the waking faint of Spring,on circling pathwaysbeside a goose-honking lake,through Sapsucker Woods’dense wetlands and forest,as a papier-mâché moon floatsover mud-dried leaves,sunglare flashes chrome off the water,gold bursts of marsh marigoldsrise from green tussocks,and hairy ropes of poison ivysnake around the barkof old dogwoods, ash, hemlocks,and one dead hornbeam,whittled by weather,…

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 onlybed you’d ever slept. With a flannel blanket head to toe, its color-hued fortonly you know, distorting the under-light. Venture back to that kingdom.It was not the fetal position; you had no need to hide. Markthe Noah’s ark measuring stick the height your daddy…

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 my heat,So high that…

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…