Poetry

It’s not safe to be a woman You come into a world of wantand to want yourself,you got to get in line behind all the other hungry mouthstheir names for youthe hooks of a bramble you go to water every daybecause everyone still needs to breathe You carry the water from eternityfrom ever sincefrom behind…

No one believes she suffers. But it seemsTo her to be her skeleton, the thingOn which the basic meat of everythingHangs, everything important anyway, from dreamsOf flying to the fear of ruin—selfTo blame, or target of another’s aim.No one remembers that she changed her name.She sets her lively brain up on a shelfInside a jar…

The day will come when someone will not be able to make the final entry.Beloved, beloved, beloved, the day’s ink will say—In every direction, thickets of least and magnitude sang.Apples sweetened. A hummingbird stood mid-air on its wings.Even the fires of hell, beloved: they could be felt.

Hold me, Earth, like a mother. Make your natureheal me, dirt, with an orange sweet potato. Slide my sorely inept red cells some ironbeans and berries, and feed my crooked fingers milk of grief, if they need it. Cry like rainstorms,sigh like gusts from the high, high distant mountains, shape your clouds as they wash…

From Sor Juana: A Canticle, a Soratorio                                       across a gap of centuries how dare    be field poet?    & live in a nun’s cell?                                         in charge of theorem                                     under subordination that you come from far                                      anthropomorphic, bride of Christ                                                       that you muse  &  make noise, study & be poet     that you carry proverbial bundle, Sor Juana, of books on your back of what?              of…

Juices swell in pears again.Fruits fallen all around us outlining our shapes.Athletic, young. Where the armory stoodbehind the school,a field that couldn’t be shared beheld from its edges. Hard and green.Then soft. Then shadowed. Coach made us lie on our backsto see this in our minds:ace after ace, closed in our faces. Distance means I can…

Here is my sad dad sat inside the smallestRoom, watching badder, sadder shows. He padsThe cold stone floor, he eats cold meat. All mustStay just as sad as him, or he gets mad.There goes my dad alarmingly aloneInto the snowstorm’s white-blown globe. I’ve leftHim home alone. He walks away in woeInto the blizzard’s bright gusts…

Am I in the lake where my bones are buried deep?Am I over the sunrise hill where my breath holds still?Behind your eyes, lids kept shut, is there a secret that you keep?Am I the one who’s been tricked? Am I the one whose life has been spilled? Do I lie within the wood slats…

In wolf-light, ivory gnaws through the rib cageof a white wind. I’d rather cross Saturn’s rusted rings, red-sandaled, a dryad with peacock throat and razor.When winter comes like a glossary of the drowned, you will find mestretched in mimicry, mocking the moon-wail as I bell my sorrow.We’ve always existed— artist, sorceress, priestess, witch, and whenwe…