Poetry

“Why is my mama sleeping?” he asksstruggling to unbuckle, hardlyhearing the noiseof the machine gun bursts His childish torso slidesunder her breasts and belly—it hurts them both, yetlax as seaweed they lie for ages under the watersmoving along with the tideuntil a man’s voiceshouts: “Come out! Out!” “Seriously?” is allshe can manage, as if lodged…

You’d think it was a teenager in a rented tuxgoing to the prom in a borrowed car butit’s a cedar waxwing in his cupsdrunk on juniper berries.I get it.I was allowed one dance at the senior promas my mother worriedI might have sex right after—disgracing the Lord and the familyin that order.The Lord in those…

On the fourth floor, doves.Some circled above usinside the caged patio.We sipped warm tea in clear glasses.Even after the sugar cubes dissolved,I kept stirring.You called the museum misleading:nothing here is actually from the Jurassic period.Not the decaying, antique dice;not the book on the Tower of Babel;not the dogs of the Soviet space program.“What kind of place…

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…