Poetry

Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…

The first birds chirp again, as if they heard the whole late July planet tilting with new law. Goose honk and crow caw and squirrel jabber are dawn light crawling up the huge maple trunk, tinting rough gray wood till it glows, green and mossy and tropical in the tilted passing of planetary items. This…

When our reprieve began I was reintroduced to Osip, my husband— a gaunt man who walked clutching his trousers. (Belts could be used for suicide, a serious offense.) The prison staff was rosy-faced. The young learn quickly: To kill is good, to be killed, bad. Soon they rise in the ranks, have their photos taken…

When we undressed in the tack room, we kept our backs turned, cradled our new breasts like the barn cat’s kittens and counted ribbons strung like tiny laundry overhead: blue, red, yellow, white, pink, green. We giggled in the dark there over the school nurse’s diagram, the new words. But we all said yes, as…

Flat, jaw-dropped face of a Downs kid, half-shut eyes, pale lids like two oysters. A wide, squat body, a slowness, he sits on a low wall, rocks forward and back with his whole torso, face blank with the rhythm of pushing a stroller forward and back, that soothing, shushing motion. My baby waits at home;…

At seven a.m., nobody’s here but me and the pigeons and a few sparrows caucusing in his hair. Everyone knows how patient he was. I talk to him sometimes, but he never answers. “Good morning, Mr. Lincoln. I’m going to clean you up real good today.” His hands rest on the chair, yet I’ve seen…

I’m remembering the time you sat on a roof in Wisconsin to get away for a smoke, and a drunk senior stumbled to the edge of the roof to take a piss then folded his body down next to yours. Below, a faint sound of drums and bass throbbed through the house. “Pigs,” said the…

for Reynolds Price   This morning in my bathroom mirror, I glimpsed the slope of my shoulders, my chest thinning to a hint of ribs, the hair of my pouching belly black and beaded with water, and pondering myself limp and priestly, laced with blue veins, I judged nothing threatening. Sometimes, I admit, I even…

Almost winter and the groundskeepers are firing     blanks into the trees, scattering a nuisance of grackles from the branches—     Enough, say the guns, enough of all your excrement and birdsong, and the very sight is futility: great fistfuls     of black confetti, the way they soar out shrill with panic and return    …