Poetry

I’m thinking about the lives                                          that failed to choose me. Night’s vast ballroom, its stuttering chandelier. Fossilized beneath refrigerator magnets is a reverie of expired coupons, clipped from the pages of fate’s circular.                      You can’t live in the what-if but you can vacation there, can’t you? I hitch one end of my hammock…

After summer, I clear away the vulgar corpses from my flower beds: coarse vinca, shriveled marigold, and molding lupine drained of color by an infestation of aphids that sucked its sweet sap dry, I learned too late. My son, who spurned my breast as an infant, still refuses most food. He’s skinny, nothing like these…

My father smoked a pipe, loved to stare in the camera’s eye, make of it a twinkle or a wink, those were the days of gin and tonic, those were the days when he believed in the magic of his fertile brain—they called his body genius, the mastery over bat and ball, the lithe in…

in that realm, a man of straw can pass for a man. sleep him in the woods on a horse’s skull—skull so he dreams of echoes, horse so his heart learns to gallop. unlearn him the language of his starving mother, pull his shoulders back, and he’ll swagger. he’ll see a blooming meadow and think,…

When you were torn from me, summer gleamed like glass and teemed down in hot, silvery,           perfect beads.   And I could not bear to be touched. Not by the silk of skin I was swathed in, not by the rain           which shattered, then regrouped, unharmed.   Rain everywhere like the touch of a man…

the way the light does the cells inside the skin or as the water does deep inside the vein of the leaf, alone in the oblong tub my toe turned the tap, newly wed to this interior. It was the year we touched no one but each other night after night, season after season, and…

This was the summer of kitchen stove burners full of tin foil, my family’s women circling esfand smoke around the house.     Our neighbor Mike was still a decade away from raping a woman. I still knew nothing of the pocketed jewelry, the body left for dead.     I still rode bikes to…