Let us admit there has been division enough; our teeth, its simplest actors. Let us admit the past—our translucent bodies’ betrayal: good natures’ good windows. We were, weren’t we, moveable? Series of solid matters sected. Mid-life and un-mothered, historical warnings hum, “Don’t split the pole—” so as not to forget oneself so as…
I too have had my hands full of what keeps me contained, a vastness softened by restraint and made more terrible because of it. I think it’s time we talk about the safety of distance, how the tire tread of rush hour traffic sounds like something being patiently worn down, how the cars parked along…
On reprieve from the rain but not the heat— we watch it gather like flowers or the men who build a house in fits & starts across the street. They saw & nail what I can’t see—a coffin cut to measure, or wedding dress sewn closed along the pinked seams….
Of us there is always less. The days hammer past, artificial daisies at the grave. Words I didn’t choose for my father’s headstone & those that came instead to live around my neck, dog tags a tin pendulum on my chest. On my mother’s side, my cousin, too young, dirt a…
What does the water want? Enters where it is not welcome, jacks up the foundation uneven & splits the wood like a look— it rusts it rusts rusts the roof through— drops by unannounced when your house a mess, rifles through Mama’s drawers, papers, borrows books for weeks & returns…
Quarter-glass in the dawn-light’s mottled hyphen. The risk of it, the resistance. I stitched the mask from lathered skins. Motes of flour in the bakery’s apse. I breathe like the machine I am, I proof the stubborn yeast. Nectar of planished faces articulating the angles: of self, of theology, of the spaces recently occupied by…
Then happiness became an egg that broke across our table. Fragments of shell through which yolk pooled to placemats: bright goopy gold that filled loose napkin folds as if all I could wish for from luck. My three-year-old pulls himself up alongside to mash peas on his tray and meow at my hand and command…
A white cat has come to sit on the backside of slaughter, To sit on a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates. The cat has come not as any witness to a crucifixion Or a coronation, not as angel or symbol of some comfort Creature, some benign break in the dying, But as human…
She was old, my mother, and dead now, or so they said, and I could think of nothing but boiling pots of water. Out the window, November’s birds pecking the dry grass. More and more water I boiled, watching it hiss and spit, roil and seethe. She was old, my mother, and…
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