Poetry

harriet. araminta ross. tubman. when once was now when i stood a woman red as dust blood sundown calling my ancestors over my dead child when once they scarred my head i took to the woods an iron full of buckshot stole myself back crowned myself a general took a hundred walks to set slaves…

we forgot to clear your grave, so we stood around talking about the bus trip, the driver who checked his mirror to see the cars hinging upon his line. We talked about those who lay next to you: a Henderson, a McCabe, a great uncle who no one could remember anything about—we looked for snakes….

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…

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…

John T. Allen, you had only $3.25. But now you are somewhere rubbing your arm, putting alcohol on that cracked cheek, now redder than when you went out into the cold. Somewhere you are opening the window to let that Melbourne Avenue light embrace you—but you know, I never did touch you. Remember? I had…

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…

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…

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…

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…