Poetry

Hold me, Earth, like a mother. Make your natureheal me, dirt, with an orange sweet potato. Slide my sorely inept red cells some ironbeans and berries, and feed my crooked fingers milk of grief, if they need it. Cry like rainstorms,sigh like gusts from the high, high distant mountains, shape your clouds as they wash…

From Sor Juana: A Canticle, a Soratorio                                       across a gap of centuries how dare    be field poet?    & live in a nun’s cell?                                         in charge of theorem                                     under subordination that you come from far                                      anthropomorphic, bride of Christ                                                       that you muse  &  make noise, study & be poet     that you carry proverbial bundle, Sor Juana, of books on your back of what?              of…

Juices swell in pears again.Fruits fallen all around us outlining our shapes.Athletic, young. Where the armory stoodbehind the school,a field that couldn’t be shared beheld from its edges. Hard and green.Then soft. Then shadowed. Coach made us lie on our backsto see this in our minds:ace after ace, closed in our faces. Distance means I can…

Here is my sad dad sat inside the smallestRoom, watching badder, sadder shows. He padsThe cold stone floor, he eats cold meat. All mustStay just as sad as him, or he gets mad.There goes my dad alarmingly aloneInto the snowstorm’s white-blown globe. I’ve leftHim home alone. He walks away in woeInto the blizzard’s bright gusts…

Am I in the lake where my bones are buried deep?Am I over the sunrise hill where my breath holds still?Behind your eyes, lids kept shut, is there a secret that you keep?Am I the one who’s been tricked? Am I the one whose life has been spilled? Do I lie within the wood slats…

In wolf-light, ivory gnaws through the rib cageof a white wind. I’d rather cross Saturn’s rusted rings, red-sandaled, a dryad with peacock throat and razor.When winter comes like a glossary of the drowned, you will find mestretched in mimicry, mocking the moon-wail as I bell my sorrow.We’ve always existed— artist, sorceress, priestess, witch, and whenwe…

The pigs are speaking to the childrenat the castle gates. The cows are enchantedby the harmonica. The petals of the flowersmake a tea to cure all ills. What about the sky? The sky is vanilla blueberry swirl with puffsof whipped cream, and the earth is darkchocolate veined with streaks of cherry red. In my bed,…

I’ve attended river baptisms in the Cahaba,church baptisms in Columbiana prop.I would’ve done a grand dunk myself, I think,had I trusted a single man to touch me.Only my first love I trusted and then onlybecause he found my body repulsive.It felt cruel, forcing him even to witness my arms.For a long time it comforted me…

We’re green and ambitious as money.Stretching, we drag as we rasp.We climb slow as blood pressure. Watch.Blindly, our yawns ache for sky. Stretching, we drag as we rasp,shiver, billow, and claw.Blindly, our yawns ache for skyspreading a red-threaded tent. Shiver, billow, and claw—these are the ways we encroach,spreading. A red-threaded tent—circus of hunger and choke….