Poetry

Beginning, I said, or becoming. He began dissecting my choice. No -ing words, no developing or growing—who are you now, not who are you beginning to be? I began stammering. I didn’t like not being believed, I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else about myself. I’d begun the day not knowing him….

First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…

After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life”                                    TodayI misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky,thousands of them, a photo of their corpses inthe Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler.Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity.Die-off. An airplane passes overhead, then another. The cradle…

—for Richard McCann At first it was unacceptable—strangers dressed in black,walking away or toward a holein the ground, each a versionof you. Seven hundred reasonsto dig holes in the earth—somelook for water, some need afence. Some for this seed,some for that body. my God,your body. When you died Ididn’t cry or even think of it…

When the home-aid nurse comesto check on my mother’s drainage tubeI am sharpening my kniveswith my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximityto the toxin, I entertain the thoughtthat disease might be seenas a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper.Come a little closer.Look here at what iswanting near….

What you snuck past: a vast copper body, two plastic hands all the better to twist you from this empty palace. You are not yet  who you will be, little sac of yolk, blood clot drifting through. What should we do with you who bedded down in a field  of red clover? You want  a piece of cake, meat silky and tender, slipping free  from the bone. You want my voice echoing into…

The old city rushes into me as soon as the planedescends, and my drunk bravado shudders.I swear to myself that I will not confrontmy family with my suffering this time around.I’ll be a civilized person instead and keeplongstanding resentment to myself. Even the partof me that is gristle and nerve is strangelyquiet. The dot dot…

O cotton-headed kissful. Tender likingof my broken skin. Fierce betrayal of instinctwrapped in embers and undiagnoses. I have missed you.I think you might have been just the firstof my forbidden desires, artifact of my deep impulseto transition a thing to another thing.Take medicine and turn it into a weapon.We knew each other over Wednesday night…

I don’t know what death is either, I think, unplugging the earbuds and ordering a decaf latte, iced. I don’t know where my father is, or mother, or where to tell my daughter she can find me. I watch the barista make the espresso shots—her down-to-there, sapling arms, the left one hanging lifeless while the…