Poetry

No one’s gonna say it, but your baby’s ugly.It’s not your fault. All babies look like aliens.This is another thing I said a little drunkthat I meant with my whole heartand every time my mouth opens the thing I meancomes out, but it comes out wrong.The ice caps are melting. Soon no one will knowwe…

What were you listening to, Great-Gramma,down at the lake, that Saturday nitewhen you felt you couldn’t breathe? Not those loriders waxed and raring, the way souped-upcarburetors suck oxygen to dragalong the strip, your gulping breaths, gurgling,ineffective. The ambulance fetched you.In the hospital, they lopped off your thick braids(to think you never grayed!) “for convenience”or “to…

In this story the cockroach is the man,the curtain my girlhood, the creamedcorn spilled by the mother wastedfamilial love, the father’s zealotrya metaphor for emotional blindness. In this story the radioactive dinosauris the man, the city of Tokyo my bodyand the metro tunnel, well, you know.Fire is fire. Explosions are explosions.The snow-capped summit of Mount…

floating at the surface of the oil the fish is weightlessand ready to come undone between your teeth.I got to call Dan Henry, he gone want this while it’s hot. Mo rises to find her phone as if gravityhas no authority over her body, liftsthe antennae to summon this husband she had since his boyhood…

Ugly is prettygeneric (there’s enough to go around),a name flung from the mirror I duck,but I hear what it says: Your living is complete defiance. All of this was foretold in my history, shapedby storefront living in my latchkey world. My ugly is alive like a plague bredon maternal distance & rage, on a fatheritching…

Here’s how I explain it: my body       has had an umbrella     open for the last 910 days               no, it hasn’t rainedat all but I like to be prepared      & I like to be untouched  /   I might carry this un-superstitionwith me forever      yes, like a child      yes, I was terrifiedafter the election       yes, I was…

Still it feels shitty, filling a grave. To raise dirtby the spade-full, just piling it on. Our task: plug a holethat holds my best friend’s dad, pack distance between a corpse and all it cared for. That the rabbi refers to itas a final kindness—a mitzvah—seems amiss, like a doorheld open to a room where…

It was summer. I was small. My uncleplunked me into his pickup to keep him companyon his run for more beer. I was glad to go.He was a loud, belching man who killed bugsfor a living. My father’s brother, with three golden teeth.I recall the calm sun, yellow and smeared.The smell of grill-smoke as he…

A certain holy, the black nylon straps becoming funeral dress.  My body, a white shroud  draped over yours. We make  two definitions of the word  bury & let them both lead us to forget. Your old name,  thrashed down my throat.  Replaced with spitslick & stiff  mythology of rubber. My breath scented like a car crash, copper  rain & tires scuffed into shadow. We celebrate the last…