Poetry

In the village, we kids picked flowersfor the mass grave colorful fragrant weedsblossoming reeds and grasses All the schoolchildrenwere locked in the school that day Huddling around cow dung cakeswe made small fires didn’t entrust to adultsour wild ghost stories Nothing remained of the schoolbut a mossy outline I tried to learn their namesthere were…

After I forgot the salsa. After my panic attackand my tumble downstairs to screaminto the winter coats. After your kindnesswasn’t enough, or it was, but I needed to getsomething right. I drove back to Victorico’sin the cold rain. And the cashier’s eyeswere soft. And I waited for the quesadillaI didn’t want. And six extra containers…

I entered someone else’s suffering and when ISurfaced I looked behind me into the sheen of it. We’d been to the bottom, the muck of scales and femursOf trees. I’d communed with the dead, my dead, to make Sense of the sunless depths. They rocked me—father,Grandmother, friend—in arms of slippery weeds that moved Like flames….

Meant to nail the iron rose wreath, the seashell macramé, the twig pentagramto my backyard fence. Forgot the hammer, the nails in the glass jar. Planted green things—spearmint, sweet basil, lavender—and deepmaroon-to-black newly noirs, white impatiens in steelboxes. I feared the mold growing from rainy day after raw rainy day. Dug down into the boxed…

When I walked past your house last nightyou’d been dead a week. A crate was tippedagainst the porch, the lights were off,the awning pitched a little further north.It reminded me of the time a friendasked me to come over while her catwas put to sleep. Rafferty—his silky legsagainst me as he passed. Like a dark…

The long stretch of green flattens into the horizon.          Forever and ever, he seems to say, but it is nothing, it is not him, it is only my mind, speaking into the silence.          In the distance, the goats wait patiently, the sun tilts patiently, the sky breathes its steady rays. We are letting time slip.          We are letting…

The bruised-blue sky, the blown-breath willow, and goldenrod fallen leaves woven with acrylic yarn into your best, most beautiful sweater: the fake wool woodscape felt soft on your skin, no stinging or deep itch, a scene wrapped around your teenage rib cage—all angle tones and autumn. You would wear nothing underneath, felt only the inside-out…

after Attila József In a garden of my own makingThe trees and I will soon be waking.Shyly, I’ll while away the hours­Planting seeds and tending flowers. And so I’ll sow and so I’ll reap,Planting, planting in my sleep.So what if all the flowers are weeds?Don’t all of us derive from seeds? I’ll drink my milk,…

There was no will. Only footwork. In sunless hospital roomsI played card games with men twice my age. Say it wasn’tabout falling but the gated terrain’s arrival after the jump,then I landed not in heaven but in Redding where I tradedmy blue jeans & black boots for a dotted white gown. Here,the men & I…