Poetry

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…

For awhile the house sagged on itself, then new people moved in with teacups that chink in a different key from the teacups that lived here before. There is an innocent pouring of coffee, a holding themselves apart, a surreptitious glance into my garden as though I grew rare greens. How hard will they struggle…

Today I started looking for my soul. Yesterday it was my keys. Last week, my brain which I couldn’t find, it being out looking for me, now that I’m getting so old.   First I thought my soul would have gone back to Greece where she grew so tall and straight, she thought she was…

Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal the verticality of trees which we notice in December as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal ourselves for so long, let us now honor the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which to…