Poetry

That reminds me. I read my name in the town ledger. Workmen stare at me from their shovel blades. It's out of the question, women won't touch me, they draw      their nets across their heads, they walk ahead of me a hundred yards. Even now I am standing in paint. I tried getting work. It's…

Down on my knees again, on the linoleum outside room six, I polish it with the scarlet remnant of Grandpa's union suit, and once again Grandma Fry looks down on me from paradise and tells me from the balcony of wrath that I am girlhood's one bad line of credit. Every older girl I know…

As if bone spilled down the stairway of a long night her marble dress unfolded the seven sevens of light. We had come to see the saint. And on a weekday, only a few of the penitent in the back pews kneeled, old women with the blue of sin already seeing through their hands. It…

Lying impatient for the burning copper thread I wake next to me on the too narrow for two bedcage. One of me his eyes squinched ankles crossed I do not wake him he is scrawled with tubes. One of me (me) a mess of broken glass circuitry sheet metal plastic a fist-sized magnet. Hungry this…

Where did she come from, that dig in the ribs? Who is she to pretend she's me and to take on that ditched-in, hopeless tone? Who is this phony yokel? This two-dollar bill, this pig knuckle? Honey, I tell her, my name is Lynn Collins Emanuel, someone whose whole manner says, I'm over-educated but recovering….

The brighter the white veil the more daring the modesty. The yellower the dandelion the more rampant the growth, the health careening toward unveiling. The louder the wheels the deeper the plough sinks in the black field. The darker the soil, the more water it holds and the deeper the plough, the louder the clank…

Now that I'm gone, my pale boy-body near your ear, my skull-white forehead used up, out beyond the lamplight, a Cain trembling on tiptoe, desperate, mute in shadows, yearning down to hear you read aloud from your stuffed armchair, I'd die to point to the art print lifted from a motel wall on the move…

Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the      Rock gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at      the café where they drink their thimblefuls of hot tea, beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of      irrigation, and someone incising a…

Maybe it was the season, coming again to the border of the cold time, though the sky stayed crazy October blue, every tree preening its last greenness before the turning and falling. The weather was in ecstasy while all the women on the bus were weeping in silence, discreetly. And I was weeping with them—…