When the sun broke up the thunderheads, and dissonance was consigned to its proper place, the world was at once foreign and known to me, that was shame leaving the body. I had lived my life from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Wet and glistening, twisting…
In the church, midweek at noon, there is a middle distance between the piercing blue window of pure belief and the bone vault housing my heart’s disbelief, a dim yielding distance related to my prayer: another day’s delay before you are nowhere— for death fixes all distances like a new nail.
Thirty-six years till my mother is born The perfumes she wore when she was young whatever happened The bottom of her jewelry drawer calls and calls as I run her through her first school play She doesn’t understand Stroke my stomach mother till I understand Why is the movie too advanced? Why do we have…
Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees, I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered not so much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled rasp of his breathing and it pushes and draws me…
The buzz of electricity circles a yellow bulb in Maine’s humid heat. June bugs bomb the porch light with spiny legs—date-colored and oversize. Spring peepers pin the night, pitch a universe in my mother’s kitchen, except I have not yet…
To Yusef Komunyakaa When I rise from the bank the water’s slow as shadow in my steps, thick as blood. The whole river’s secretive, still, dark as roux cooled in the skillet, as rank, as sweet, ancient as catfish, ancienter. The moon’s sifted light clouds rumor to lilies or daffodils, an egret on the…
Thoughts have gone wolf again, hunting for reasons in the dark. Suppose we were never supposed to fall into each other’s arms? Made a bone-boat tossed all our memories in— watched it sail. There’s a chance I know nothing and I…
Pretend a boom box blasts over your shoulder. Raise your hands in the air. Twist them as if picking mangoes. Look to the right as if crossing streets. Look to the left, slowly as if balancing orange baskets. Bend as if picking cotton. Do the rump. Straighten up as if dropping firewood. Rake, do the…
watched a crew wipe the family name from the face of our supper club. The new owners slapped a cartoon moose on the sign out front. If I tell him I love him, either he is holding my little hand while we step across an icy parking lot toward a greasy burger joint or he…
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