Poetry

In the Empress’s Palace

Ringed like Saturn, walls surround gates surround moats, your tiny room sits at the flaming core. I brush the showy lilac. Pass the hall of beggars, and door goddess, her waist burdened with sticks. By noon I've seen gardens, temples, tasted the plush, smoky breath of the food taster. You rise to greet me, then…

mozambique

a rock she's been saving holding down the corner of a place that bleeds on the stitched borders of her mind and the children play there if they come with bulldozers she's prepared this time this is the subversive they'll find hiding in her pantry a rock from the old house they bulldozed last time…

Moon Cakes

Call it stuffing: raisins coated with flour, nuts, fruit. Or call it conspiracy, the seeds of revolt. The cake is just a carrier, a cloak. The secret, buried inside, takes root and when the time comes, holds good women together. For the elders— baked-in paper, scribbled with a place and time to banish Moguls from…

Of Pairs

The mockingbirds, that pair, arrive, one, and the other; glossily perch, respond, respond, branch to branch. One stops, and flies. The other flies. Arrives, dips, in a blur of wings, lights, is joined. Sings. Sings. Actually, there are birds galore: bowlegged blackbirds brassy as crows; elegant ibises with inelegant cows; hummingbirds' stutter on air; tilted…

Courtly Love

A rainbow, where it ends a red MG, Texas plates, a friend's white empty kitchen. Out the window a blond stick stretches blue legs against a red barn door. I can't see sweat, but her face is red, hair flaxen, chopped blunt as if a mixing bowl guided the scissor. Conversation? Call it awkward. She…

At Sixty-Four

Now I'm Rembrandt's age when he died. For years I've been tracking his self-portraits in the museums of Europe and America, watching the bright eyes of his twenties gradually sadden into old age. In those last portraits he seems to be saying, “I have seen enough, lost enough, died enough.” But when I look at…

Aunt Ida Pieces a Quilt

You are right, but your patch isn't big enough. —Jesse Jackson When a cure is found and the last panel is sewn into place, the Quilt will be displayed in a permanent home as a national monument to the individual, irreplaceable people lost to AIDS—and the people who knew and loved them most. —Cleve Jones,…