Our matriarch says we’re not a cemetery-visiting family, but she knows who is:the next of kin who sent the telephonefashioned entirely of flowers with the banner Jesus Called, Debbie Answered. Tonight, no wake,no funeral procession. Instead, we crack glowbracelets on the beach. Float seaweed bouquetsknotted with washed-up bits of fishing line. We hold open a…
In the garden, the cat barfed up two wingsfrom some bird he couldn’t swallow. Nothingis concealed that will not be revealed. When you put it like that, it’s almost beautiful.Like, suddenly it all makes sense. Stickerson car windows keep reminding me that Idahois shaped like a gun, just add a trigger anda pine tree bullet….
May you never bear fruit again. The disciplesheard Him say it. I’ve been hungry too, toldthe car door to fuck off when I bumped my head.Kicked the dog, and shoved my son into his room.Woe unto. Poor tree. Whose fault, its fruit is bornbefore its leaves. Then He overturnedthe money tables, knocked down the dovesinside…
By 1970, 33 states had bannedshoe-store x-ray machines. Mr. Levitz sits on a stoolmeasuring feet with a steelslide that feels cool when itnudges the tip of my toe.Future and past mean lessthan the ash on his cigarette,which will fall on the floor,because the plate in hishead makes him forgetwhat happened beforethe war. But these shoeswill…
In dreams, she sees her mother arrive in a land where the boreal canopy eclipses homeland. Her first memory of an elk in Jasper, Alberta: its legs seizing with strength, it gallops toward homeland. As she reads the Quran, she becomes a rose-ringed parakeet ascending over bismillah to find homeland. She is…
From you, I was born, my body an isosceles triangle made with two equal sides of longing: what is given and what is prayed for, these pining lengths yoked together by the latitude of a risen country I have never visited. I imagine the view from the ocean is your body, and your body is…
Every prayer is a heron at first glance, the marbled neck of someone indistinguishable from this house. Every figure wildreed unbelonged cursive is a morning’s mound of sugar. This mosque is a wood where I sit cross-legged, alder straight. Where I mirror my mother’s twenty-year-ago askings. …
Perhaps with a desk between,some chaste space, the recruiter leaningforward, warm bodies on the other side. Of the teenagers presentone will lie about her age,one will eat bananas to make weight, one pull herself from small-town quicksand.Lace the hands behind the head,look good in a uniform, look nonchalant. Army doesn’t take everyone,maybe you, maybe not,…
Where this body is a map and blood, great-blood, great-great-blood is the destination, where the tragedy is not knowing a name until it is a burial, and even then, only after it is hallowed from its journey, crossing a sea, wrung on the muscles of grief. At your grave, it must be…
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