Poetry

after Larry Levis   My youth?          I spent it all between the knees of hairbraiders, begging kanekalon to name me a debutante or mistake me foreign. Those knees I matured between   worked weeks at Kween of Kinks   Braid Boutique, which was an old U.S. Cellular, behind which my boyfriend’s Chevrolet vanished under sleet. And…

I do a summer job, flaunting the “Round 2” sign for the ring. I never wear thongs or wink. The boys swing at musk air all butterfly, but where the hell’s that exalted bee?          All July, police play games involving pepperspray against boys with frigid fathers          but in this ring, no boy is born of any man…

There is no law against evil. You buried your son alone under a lime tree. He was almost a boy but they called him something else, as though you 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…

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

He was looking for news of the world. He was looking for his daughter who died in the fire, the car that burst into flames, the crash, his wife who left him for her lover, he was looking   at the world through a window in the den, where he kept the photographs and the…

There was some connection to be made— your death, the election, the absurd snow— and I charged myself with making it, walking down Court Street after therapy, passing under mantled elms, watching the skaters’ ankles brace against the weight of their careening. In the rink’s center, a girl spun herself into a small torpedo, red…

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

I go into our bedroom closet with its one blue work shirt, the cuffs   frayed, the paint stains a loopy non- narrative of color, of spirit.   Now that you are bodiless and my body’s no longer the body you knew,   it’s good to be reminded every morning of the great mess, the…

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 saw there, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one   office to the…