Poetry

She volunteered to become ma to me after callingthe one who birthed but left me, whore. I becamean Every Daughter, chipped myself into anarchipelago, skimmed desert sands, daughteredand disappointed the two of them, being born ofpoison oak, distrusting forgiveness but making nowaves. In secret, I redesigned myself as twins— the first quite quiet, the other…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

He was looking for news of the world. He was looking for his daughterwho died in the fire, the car that burst into flames, the crash, his wifewho left him for her lover, he was looking at the world through a window in the den, where he kept the photographsand the heater, the air conditioner…

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…

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…

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…