Poetry

  • Blooms exactly

    after Larry Levis My youth?          I spent it all betweenthe knees of hairbraiders, begging kanekalonto name me a debutante or mistake meforeign. Those knees I matured between worked weeks at Kween of Kinks Braid Boutique, which was an old U.S. Cellular, behindwhich my boyfriend’s Chevrolet vanished under sleet. Andsouthern magnolias in hibernation pulsed like sea channels,…

  • Light flyweight

    I do a summer job,flaunting the “Round 2” signfor the ring. I never wear thongsor wink. The boys swing at musk airall butterfly, but where the hell’s thatexalted bee?          All July, police play gamesinvolving pepperspray against boys with frigidfathers          but in this ring, no boyis born of any man who wintered him.          One suffersuppercuts, works a warm yellow…

  • Mare

    There is no law against evil. You buried your son aloneunder a lime tree. He was almost a boy but they called him something else, as thoughyou had carried him up a staircase inside you and missed a step. I never knew you with long hair,without your thick history. The light held your face like…

  • The Unfolding

    I let a boy lick my paper skin because he told meI was pretty. I let a man undress me, because he wouldn’tstop kissing me. I left my body at a party, and thenI left it again. A secret: sadness has no sound—not crying,just silence, like how at 5:00 a.m. I woke up in the…

  • Magical Thinking

    There was some connection to be made—your death, the election, the absurd snow—and I charged myself with making it, walkingdown Court Street after therapy, passing undermantled elms, watching the skaters’ anklesbrace against the weight of their careening. In the rink’s center, a girl spun herself into a smalltorpedo, red coat flaring conical, dark hat poking…

  • Anatomy Practical

    I am searching for the phrenic nervewhen I remember the bad feeling I have about you. Formalin pricking my nose, an attentive hush pressing all around me.This test is timed, butI look into the body, and I’m lost. The word itself makes me anxious,sounds frantic, frenetic.Lightning strike climbing up beside the heart. Now my eyes…

  • Blue Work Shirt

    I go into our bedroom closetwith its one blue work shirt, the cuffs frayed, the paint stains a loopy non-narrative of color, of spirit. Now that you are bodilessand my body’s no longer the body you knew, it’s good to be reminded every morningof the great mess, the brio of art-making. —On the floor, the…

  • Losing

    My brother is lost. I can’t find my brother. I say it over again—when I lost my brother. A back road I knew once and now can’t find. A specific wave on John’s Pond. The last one we sawthere, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one office to the next, and no one…