Poetry

Same one we’d kept in the garage   or in the toolshed my whole life, same   loose handle, same tarnished blade. I’d seen my father   sharpen it on the bench grinder, sparks flying, to cut   through roots or hardened soil. Same one I’d used   to replant our overgrown geraniums one spring,…

Ignore that I am invisible to you, a man old enough to call a girl a girl when I see one.   Ignore how I am held up by a half-Windsor slouched under teeth yellow as a work day is endless.   Ignore the depth of my voice and listen. It’s not the van. Or…

Not my daughter and me saying once, and once again, to remember we need tofu. But more me saying, please call if you’re going to be really late. And then we’re way past re-, and eyerolls won’t undo it, and compulsion won’t let the mind rev any way but. There’s a moth—the greater wax moth—that…

There was a time when, sitting in a parking lot, I could make the parked car in front of me dematerialize. Could drive straight through it, if I wanted to. That was an unwashed time, birdcalls trapped in drawers, matching sets of months when a face could never move a face again. Dematerializing the parked…

She never set foot in that house, was on the other side of the world, living her life as if every day were Sunday, though given her location this was no blessing, just another day of shortages, of thuds in the distance that made one’s mind leap even when one’s body was in bed. One…

She volunteered to become ma to me after calling the one who birthed but left me, whore. I became an Every Daughter, chipped myself into an archipelago, skimmed desert sands, daughtered and disappointed the two of them, being born of poison oak, distrusting forgiveness but making no waves. In secret, I redesigned myself as twins—…

after Larry Levis   My youth?          I spent it all between the knees of hairbraiders, begging kanekalon to name me a debutante or mistake me foreign. Those knees I matured between   worked weeks at Kween of Kinks   Braid Boutique, which was an old U.S. Cellular, behind which my boyfriend’s Chevrolet vanished under sleet. And…

I do a summer job, flaunting the “Round 2” sign for the ring. I never wear thongs or wink. The boys swing at musk air all butterfly, but where the hell’s that exalted bee?          All July, police play games involving pepperspray against boys with frigid fathers          but in this ring, no boy is born of any man…

There is no law against evil. You buried your son alone under a lime tree. He was almost a boy but they called him something else, as though you had carried him up a staircase inside you and missed a step. I never knew you with long hair, without your thick history. The light held…