Poetry

On reprieve          from the rainbut not the heat— we watch it          gather like flowersor the men who build a house in fits          & startsacross the street. They saw          & nail whatI can’t see—a coffin cut to measure,          or wedding dresssewn closed along the pinked seams.          The earthstitched shut above the heads          of the dead—whose hands, before buried, held flowers          or rosariesor only each…

Of us there is          always less.The days hammer past, artificial daisies          at the grave.Words I didn’t choose for my father’s headstone          & those that came insteadto live around my neck, dog tags a tin          pendulum on my chest.On my mother’s side, my cousin, too young,          dirt a pile above herbut no stone, nothing but the tinfoil name          from the funeral home—the…

What does          the water want?Enters where it is not          welcome, jacksup the foundation uneven          & splits the woodlike a look— it rusts          it rustsrusts the roof through— drops by unannounced          when your house a mess,rifles through Mama’s drawers, papers, borrows          books for weeks& returns them waterlogged, dogged,          without no note—or knock—plucks baby pictures          out their frames& blurs all the names—          endless,oblivious, it apologizes          & blesses&…

Quarter-glass in the dawn-light’s mottled hyphen. The risk of it, the resistance.I stitched the mask from lathered skins. Motes of flour in the bakery’s apse.I breathe like the machine I am, I proof the stubborn yeast. Nectar of     planished facesarticulating the angles: of self, of theology, of the spaces recently occupiedby doors, closed to us. My…

Then happiness became an egg that brokeacross our table. Fragments of shellthrough which yolk pooled to placemats:bright goopy gold that filled loose napkin foldsas if all I could wish for from luck.My three-year-old pulls himself up alongsideto mash peas on his tray and meow at my handand command time to follow and stay. Can I…

A white cat has come to sit on the backside of slaughter,                 To sit on a white bull bearing a necklace of pomegranates.The cat has come not as any witness to a crucifixion                 Or a coronation, not as angel or symbol of some comfortCreature, some benign break in the dying,                 But as human wish, as distraction from suffering….

She was old, my mother,and dead now, or so they said,and I could think of nothingbut boiling pots of water. Out the window,November’s birds peckingthe dry grass. More and more waterI boiled, watching it hissand spit, roil and seethe. She was old, my mother,and dead now, orso they said. Hour after hourI boiled wateruntil my…

All I ever needed to bring up with her was cranberries.She brightened no one’s eyes; I befriended her frown.Bogs, she says, when I rhyme fog.Bone-chilling overcast, she affirms damply.Wouldn’t you like to slip away from your burned houseand head to the cold coast, even if they have to searchfor you? I did that when the…

I’d bring them home in jars, in my bare hands,or sometimes wound around my arms: garter snakes,with their sleek yellow stripes, dull brown lizardstheir spiny toes and jagged sides. Once, a baby ringneck snake,no bigger than my pinkie, wearing its thin choker of coral. In Barbados, at my grandparents’, it was novelty I loved—to reach…