Poetry

1. Woke up early to write, killed flies instead.   2. In the pot, I boil bones with huājiāo and fennel, attempting to reproduce a past taste. The result is a gray diluted broth, ghost enough to conjure.   3. On Facebook you can tag a picture as “my grandmother.”   If you hover your…

You will want to go back. Not right away, perhaps, not as you run towards the train’s open doors   and not during the nightmiles in which the distance collapses under the wheels into ordinary darkness.   And maybe not while laid across the row of empty airplane seats, the young Chinese couple helping you…

—after Wrecked Archive B-45HqDHfqp by Patty Paine I am inching along the Mackinac Bridge, passenger in a van. Through the frosted window, the sun is a yellow explosion, blown open, its blood a sulfur-yellow sheen that pools in the distance on top of Lake Huron. The clack-clack-clack of the tires over the bridge’s steel grates sounds…

—after Wrecked Archive B-VAYKjKGqG image by Patty Paine Initially, I think the clown is in charge, because he is tweeting nothing but commands—no salutations, no jokes or puns or other clown-speak—but I am wrong. “I know who all of you punks are!” he yells, shaking his fist, clutching a list that he thinks identifies the children,…

The world returns a bit on the fifth Alone Together day.                                             Amina’s teacher sends assignments over email.                     A friend calls with good news: Eileen got the Good Letter, the happy one from the school she wanted.                                         We return to the endless task of freeing the front yard from weeds, and neighbors come by and stand…

                                                            how much of the hand is fist my father asks—                                                   for him it’s half what you’d expect—the tape’s temper                between splint and split knuckles: symbol’s useless rigor;                                         the long ride home—                                                             for the boy with the torn lip, it’s half what you’d expect                                  …

maybe it’s too early for glow, slow as                                                                       she left our house one day, a cloud slung like what a soldier might carry                                                                       a bolt against a red door, and never came back home—I’ll never understand why                                                                       not once more to gather _________ my mother, for example, carried                                                                       the May lilacs, vulgar in their epithet,…

The orchard rippling in torrential wind and apples themselves bob or drop, a swift lapsarian plunge. Meal and moldering— in every core, trace cyanide and seed.   Again, again, against the wind, my hat like such small boat with sail taught, tugging. A lowtide mind, a rough dumb slosh-round bone. The satisfaction to be gained…

Would’ve said, did you see the calves all copper and gold, cold leaning into their hulking mothers?   Would’ve said, I grew up warm in a house with the wrong kind of bounty, sulking all over myself.   Would’ve said room temperature affection is the gelded way I try to keep you from disappointment.  …