Before she died, my motherpracticed turning herself into stone.Now she sits—a rock on my father’s grave,six feet above his reach. Each springhe punches a hole in his roof,sending up a riot of yellow flowersto tempt her into softening. The tendrilsof his need claw the air, grope to touch her,but she will have none of it….
I don’t wear long dresses because bad things always happen when I do.For Kai’s wedding, he hit his head skinny dipping afterwards on the cementby the pool, ended up in the ER while his bride slept, her father aninappropriate Gemini questioning me all night long, sober like therighteous lion. I wore a long dress and…
Everything threatens— benches meant for childrenoccupied by old men who clutter the playground and interrupt the slideswhere a schizophrenic takes interstellar dictation. I’m looking for a way out—not a way down and play the game of sidewalk juxtapositions:cons versus dot coms crazies versus kids in superhero shirts.Side-eyed I watch untrimmed hedges, listen for brush lurkersif the volume of footsteps turns up….
The boy won’t fall asleep without books, pictures before bed of polar bears who never leave a scentof blood against the ice, watered down tales of jolly rotten pirates setting sail. The cannons shoot coconuts. If there’s a pistol, it’s polished, …
We have changed only in our teeth all of us look vaguely 19 but hard-lived for 19I overheard it was a half-joke like your daughter she’s so easy to love to my father and we all laugh back home a hurricane is shaking the waterand even here rain you look a little like a morgue cold skin and clean clean gown lace like…
Plow your tweener backpack into your fellow sinner. I was fallen too. Sulk into your years and cropped organdy nails. Everybody’s watching. Your body’s burnt to ash, to the stranger’s thumbprint on your stubborn pimples. I see a younger you, a candle-smoke ghost hardening into form, fleshy knees and fists marbled at the altar rail. You’re still the baby who asked no deliverance. We’re not fallen. We’re great apes, pupae, whales, you’re a studious, overheated ostrich, as unformed as imagery in your mind’s eye, fortune’s adolescent child, daydreamer on…
is about sorrow the same way the 56-ounce bag of redwhite and blue M&Ms is about sorrow. The formerhas a chorus in which Jurado croons is in your armswhile the latter features text—resealable zipper!—at bag’s top because if you’ve got somethingtoo stupid to say aloud you should shout it. 71˚, Mayin Indiana, the sun+breeze so…
The last time I saw my fathersound and marrow-filled, he was standing on the front porch—almost the weight of a ghost. As I waved goodbyeI felt a nerve twitch— like a dog’s ear batting a fly.He never sold me the world. He never said that peopleare good. But the next morning when he stopped like…
I don’t often revisit the year I fosteredall the neighborhood strays, teenagers enticed by decay and overrunwith the lesions that wistfulness deals. I don’t often revisit the year my parentsdisappeared, but whose house we filled with smoke so indissolubleit consoled like blindness— the year pedestrians crossed the streetto avoid my yard, alive with ragwort and…
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