Poetry

Ann Arbor V.A. Hospital Black matter, black hole, blacker than charcoal, tar, crow in winter, blackest thing I’d ever seen, thirty years later the blackest thing I’ve ever seen, that thin black leg below the still-white thigh angling from the veteran’s hospital gown the way person, place and time long ago angled away from his…

“Someone stole my name,” a girl sobs, pigtails cinched with blue rubber bands. I want to name the bus we wait for, Huff, the wind, What? Inferno, sigh the fried potatoes whose scent drifts in from a luncheonette. Who stole the land where potatoes first were sown? Who stole the vernacular of ancestors? And that…

She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…

We refused to obey the law and scatter your ashes a full mile offshore: you had asked for the tiderocks— chain of islets, really, off the point, where the sea explodes most crystalline; but walkable at low water— after a handful were buried on my father’s grave. What childhood foot-memory kept me steady, the square…

Things that can turn to shrapnel: Steel and stone. Crockery. Wood. Glass. And bone.

We thought: after us there will be a blue moth flying jaggedly sideways. Round dusty sparrows will peck indignantly at the stone sill. There will still be rolling clouds and their shadows on Altamira will fold in steep valleys. After us, there may also be lovers, stripping and trembling, bargaining with the air between two…

Here, take it, my mother would say, unwinding a scarf from her neck, slipping off a bracelet, a ring too small for my finger she tried to force anyway. A giver, a couldn’t-hold- on-to-it, my mother was. She would give you, as they say, the shirt off her back—and ours. My father’s three-piece suit and…

A row of lights behind the valence lets down warm loops of plummy color, matte with dust, but even in light, deep folds of shadow stand like a forest, hiding the whispering players. We of the audience chatter and shift as we wait for the curtains to open, keeping our eyes on the empty apron,…

First just a few, then more, then more— this one a gift, this one a pity adoption. They flutter as she passes. They call when she comes home. She strokes them, soothes them. They flap, agitated. She tries to nap, but their cries are constant. They are starving. They will not be placated. She says…