We squat in the sun, in black dirt abraded from the mountain. You prick my arm with a thorn. “Does it hurt?” It does hurt. We’re playing nurse and mother getting her abortion. You draw out all my blood, then with invisible gauze from your imaginary white enamel tray bandage my sore arm. In her…
No coat, bad shoes, caught sudden In a spring downpour, a girl scrambles Into a small market on her way Home from school. The old man is alone, Picking bruised apples from a bin, tossing them Softly, one at a time into a slop can. Usually, he chases kids out, having caught them lifting Chocolate…
Catherina Schrader, midwife, nearly an apparition in mists rising from the Wadden Zee, follows a stranger to his boggy farm. The man is afraid of his wife, her cries, her twisted face. Who knows what may enter a woman and flourish there? There have been stories—monsters with fingers and toes grown together like pigs’ feet…
Angry at my persistent rejection of what he said Was his love, a skinny neighborhood boy Once held his mother’s kitchen knife To my twelve-year-old throat. This comes to mind Today as I walk past a couple of tough teenage boys Near the local high school, dressed in the same Oversized black shirts and backwards-turned…
The mother kneels beside her grieving child, grieving because the whale has not come, because the whales are elsewhere, not heaving clear of the water where child and mother can see them. In the brilliant light of a day at sea, the child whimpers. Her own small sea ebbs and rolls until she spews an…
The muscular hollows: eye, lung, heart, stomach, hand. The parts that you enliven: lips, hair, spine. The necessary and cleansing wastes— sweat, blood, urine, stool, and sperm. But certain places of my body are not specified or named until reached by the first unexpected drop of rain, or the careless, accidental touch of your fingernail….
I can taste that tongue for me you’ve set to rubbing in your pocket Like a stone excited cricket, flint you’ll strike when right in moonsteam: blue Glue, apogee, cunt of night. Coyotes, a fire round in a ground. Much hair is all of your black bones suckling Open in my throat all…
Partially green leaves are falling on Camille’s Italian restaurant where grapes tint our lips, and the linens are more inviting than our bed. Our eyes shine like the blue glaze on our plates. Heat radiates through the shale of my spine now suddenly recalling the black bitter chill of deep sea as if my body…
It is just a family. am just a girl posing at the mirror in a flowered cotton shift, combing back my short hair, deciding whether I’m beautiful. I know the creak in the floor by heart and the hiss of the door behind me, drawing itself shut. When I cross the room, my brothers and…
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