Poetry

Pulling out government coupons for the first time In a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk up So the bagboys and cashiers and seniors Browsing tabloids would all be strangers, She’s slow motion through and past their stares. She feels every nuance of her body As a tense repressed trembling, a calculated Conscious stepping, just…

The riddle of the garden is the garden. The hollyhocks, chest-high, their irresponsible profligacy. The nethering stonecrop. The wax in which the body walks. The fragrance kneeling at the lily’s mouth. The story that is the lily, the fragrance; the peonies, their exfoliate hives. The weavers in their close huts of wattle hurl questions at…

Looming over the little sewing kit and the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner, I am a giant— a king standing before the royal mirror in an enormous robe of terrycloth. As a sign of my benevolence, I will forego coffee from room service and check out early before my tiny subjects arrive to wash…

There are some things I should tell you beforehand: I was born on a bed covered quickly with a quilt. I stepped my bare feet into the new world of a lamp-lit room in the country. Because of a broken driveshaft we stayed, my mother and I, among the witch-hazel straddled houses and the buzzard-heavy…

Pascagoula, Mississippi Do Not Enter the green stucco school, cyclone fence studded with debris and memorial wreaths, monkey bars shadowing blacktop where hopscotch, four square still scrawl yellow. Do Not Touch the dodge ball under the crepe myrtle tree or the waterline ringing the building, boarded windows eyes shut tight against the flood. Do Not…

That summer in the mound of sand someone left beside the cesspool lid, my father managed to grow a watermelon— it’s not what you’re picturing—maybe not even edible, the size of a softball, but, hell, it was a watermelon, and, all year round, the man worked two jobs in the City, and only came out…

“If ever, oh ever a Wiz there was, The Wizard of Oz is one because—double-time!— because-because-because!” Mania does liven up a song. We detoured for candy cigarettes. My old pastime— I smoked; he sang the entire score. Dad was well, so he got visitation. It had been—I’d lost track of time— a year? He launched…

The high school kids are so beautiful in their lavender blouses and crisp white shirts. They open their mouths to sing with that far-off stare they had looking out from the crib. Their voices lift up from the marble bed of the high altar to the blue endless ceiling of heaven as depicted in the…

After the funeral, after friends and distant relatives departed, and the house, once again, grew quiet, we opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away in boxes dresses, shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests of linens and lace, the quilts she had sewn sitting by the window on…