Poetry

Same one we’d keptin the garage or in the toolshedmy whole life, same loose handle, same tarnishedblade. I’d seen my father sharpen it on the bench grinder,sparks flying, to cut through roots or hardenedsoil. Same one I’d used to replant our overgrowngeraniums one spring, from the front of the houseto the back lot. Now, I’m…

Ignore that I am invisible to you,a man old enough to call a girl a girl when I see one. Ignore how I am held up by a half-Windsorslouched under teeth yellow as a work day is endless. Ignore the depth of my voice and listen. It’s not the van.Or the bumper. Or the rubber…

Not my daughter and me saying once, and once again, to remember we need tofu. But more me saying, please call if you’re going to be really late. And then we’re way past re-, and eyerolls won’t undo it, and compulsion won’t let the mind rev any way but. There’s a moth—the greater wax moth—that…

There was a time when, sitting in a parking lot, I could make the parked car in front of me dematerialize. Could drive straight through it, if I wanted to. That was an unwashed time, birdcalls trapped in drawers, matching sets of months when a face could never move a face again. Dematerializing the parked…

She never set foot in that house, wason the other side of the world, livingher life as if every day were Sunday, thoughgiven her location this was noblessing, just another day ofshortages, of thuds in the distance that madeone’s mind leap even when one’sbody was in bed. One day bledinto another, the ash of intention…

She volunteered to become ma to me after callingthe one who birthed but left me, whore. I becamean Every Daughter, chipped myself into anarchipelago, skimmed desert sands, daughteredand disappointed the two of them, being born ofpoison oak, distrusting forgiveness but making nowaves. In secret, I redesigned myself as twins— the first quite quiet, the other…

after Larry Levis My youth?          I spent it all betweenthe knees of hairbraiders, begging kanekalonto name me a debutante or mistake meforeign. Those knees I matured between worked weeks at Kween of Kinks Braid Boutique, which was an old U.S. Cellular, behindwhich my boyfriend’s Chevrolet vanished under sleet. Andsouthern magnolias in hibernation pulsed like sea channels,…

I do a summer job,flaunting the “Round 2” signfor the ring. I never wear thongsor wink. The boys swing at musk airall butterfly, but where the hell’s thatexalted bee?          All July, police play gamesinvolving pepperspray against boys with frigidfathers          but in this ring, no boyis born of any man who wintered him.          One suffersuppercuts, works a warm yellow…

There is no law against evil. You buried your son aloneunder a lime tree. He was almost a boy but they called him something else, as thoughyou had carried him up a staircase inside you and missed a step. I never knew you with long hair,without your thick history. The light held your face like…