for Mama belly pooched like a teacakeseventeen years old thrusttoward the congregation framedby stained glass deacon eyesthat nicked at her legs fixon her lips as she says i’m sorry months passthe young absent fathermumbles sorry my mamasays i have to go to schoolhe tucks the baby’s picture in hiswallet grins but she look just like…
Tell me again how when you met hershe was kind, she was capable, tell mehow you begat a pack of usthen took us to an overblown hillto ski, flimsy poles betraying a hopeabsurd in the face of the imminent accidents,the potential breakage. Tell mehow willing we were, young, to fling ourselves downsteep slopes, and no…
on the sidewalk. The sky was blue back then,the road empty. Today, a smoke cloud lingers from fires burning elsewhere, and when I lookout the window the sun burns a perfect red hole through the sky. Looking at it now, I can’t helpbut be taken back there, to the end of it, the cigarette butt…
Wisteria sinensis thick as a wrist, wrapped around brick, or pine, or some other living thing: it’s not suffocation if it’s also beautiful. It is not invasive if it also heralds spring. All winter you waited for the creeping vine to burst forth, earlier than trumpet. The purple of early bruise. The slow strangle of climb toward chimney or…
It’s beautiful to be glad to see a personevery time you see them, as I was to see Juan,the maintenance man, with whom it was always the samebrotherly greeting—each of us thumping fistover heart, and grinning, as though we shared a joke,or bread. I barely knew him. Evenings in clinic,me finishing my work, him beginning…
The cardinal at my window sings year-round, does not migrate or shed her colors, builds an open cup from parched grass and the hair she plucks from the dog’s bristled ear, cannot bear the sight of her own face reflected in the pane— is a red river, a cleric’s crown, an artery.
desperately, butyour shadow is so interesting—profile in silhouette elegant, nose almostGrecian, receding hairline, high browsuggests perhaps a keen intelligence,capable of reflection, new perspectives.Every movement graceful, not onewasted step or gesture, perfectlyric in black and white, crisp,edgy—not your usual wishy-washyfade to maybe
Once, a woman’s musk on the trainconjured the pinch of my seaside youth—briny, consistent in its waterlogged blessing. I waited outmy contract of subtropical longing, now here,manifested in these splayed, commuters’ bodiespeppered with wage and heat, lapping each other daily. I bend down and boost you up, future self, older woman,hold you up to the…
Like when she takes out a 1000-pieceAbstract—a Kandinsky or mandala of Buddha’s numberless lives—she’s telling me she hasn’t lost hope yetbut it’s iffy for us. When Lois slides from the shelfone from The World’s Great Destinations series, for example,“Balloons on a Spring Night over Paris,”—actually, any placewe’ve been together—she’s wishing she had wings, or for…
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