Poetry

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…

My father thought I was old enough to learn about Hiroshima. We were walking in light snow among the newly built houses at Caldwell. Many were unfinished. A droplight hung from the butt of an exposed beam. The bricks in a wheelbarrow had frozen in a heap. Hammers lay scattered in the stiff, white grass….

I love sitting up with this thick book for the decidedly non-physicist because it assures me there is sense to be found in those absurdly colossal lassos of gravity, great lariats of orbits inside orbits, just as there is nonsense in matter’s subatomic peekaboo that slips every noose. Sentence by sentence, both, at once, are…

I want the world to change and to stay exactly as it is. Anyone who disagrees must never have held one woman while thinking of another. There’s talk of cloning the mammoth, and the seed vaults of Norway continue to fill with the hardiest strains of lemongrass. I still remember the day my daughter came…