Poetry

Before she brought me forth, I wish she’d known how much more she’d need to take away, the mom I knew marooned in Alabama. Moves to MS, FL, and TN, and she can’t return without a flat tire, financial fiasco, old lovers making pilgrimage who could undo the curse but instead scrape off the lonely…

We found the cardinal near the bird feeder: stiff, eyes fixed, wearing the brightest red coat of any bird I’ve seen this summer. With a shovel I lift him from the dirt, show him to my daughter who gazes upon the orange bill, the rigored body, leans in close enough to touch.  Was it raptured?…

When she comes to take you away she asks if your ring comes off. You twist and twist. You surrender. Celeste says it will come off later. In those next hours so many doors open, none of them returning you to me. A man in the atrium below plays piano— an ambling, jazzy, wine spritzer….

A mast year for acorns, so like marbles and so many we’re afraid of falling. I walk sideways down the hill, holding a long stick; Kate goes before me wearing her orange knit cap. Everything alive is changing. Everything un-alive is changing. What did we think to stop? The broken trees lean on the unbroken…

So, I’ve grown less apparent apparently: the young men walk their dogs, and when our dogs meet we look at the dogs without raising our eyes to each other. The fathers stand outside the elementary school laughing with the mothers—Exactly, one of them says to the other— my passing presence faded like a well-washed once-blue…

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawings of a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hall singing about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musical and was a farmer, but wanted to be…

What have you done? Opened this box of sound, warped like sand beneath water, remember that? The waves of perception moving you away from me. We grow farther apart, but we are equal in our ignorance of how. No change there. Like celestial bodies distancing—like the animals in autumn. How? This knowledge, how will you…

After the protest at dusk, two policemen on horseback closing the park approached me and Vita and offered us rides home. Sheepish but game, we grabbed hold of their leather and galloped across field and hill to the edge. Gassed and smiling, we waved goodbye. Jim was waiting at the restaurant. I wanted to tell…

My mother was once held at knifepoint for a day. The man positioned the blade at the blue places of her pulse, as if tracing the ground for water, divining as it’s known. Or maybe I’m thinking of the pointed device that searches for sapphire, bright veins beneath the earth. Throughout my childhood, I imagined…