You are so good, so terrible to me.Please listen to Schubert and take your medicine. Standing by the bathroom window,I count three honeybees and one hummingbird.My eyes are clear. Contact lenses humin their case. Yesterday, I hunted you downin Hayao Miyazaki films and animal documentaries.I walked through my house, lookingfor something you could eat. Said, …
My gallows-humor grandmother and my Scorpionic ex-boyfriend stand side by side at the foot of my bed. They may be standing years apart and only appear as if together, but no matter, the effect is simultaneous. They’re both happy to see me, both offering what looks like encouragement to join them. Sure, I tell them, …
The world is full of hair, dissembling. Mine sheds strand by strand, clump by lustrous clump. I could reach up and pull out a handful, make a wig, dye it teal blue. In the window there’s a tree gathering elegance now that the Rockies have promised this winter’s snows are done. I’m living too unobserved …
In the evening, my dad walked with me through Duke Gardens, past Carolina jessamine,the common dogwood, blue anemone— nameplates declared each one a worthy specimen.Since his death, I remember all the freeice creams I got (an eye patch on a cute kid) when he brought me here after surgery.On the table, I was singular, surroundedby …
The snake sunned in the yard all afternoon. When my mother let him out in the morning, all was usual but by the time we called him in that evening my parents’ marriage had ended, and my father had taken off his ring and hidden it in an upstairs sock drawer. There was crying, a …
It was a sleepover & she’d never put her hair up in a high ponytail before. We’d been best friends for years, bought cheap necklaces that split heartsinto even best-friend pieces, but tonight we were all sick of her: how she thought the lyrics to TLC’s “Unpretty” were Damn!I’m pretty!, how she cried mascara-blue tears …
As soon as the children are grown I want to trash it, that is, myself: how good and free it feels to be extraneous, a disasteragain. The moment the children drive away past the long whiskers of cholla plants into the freezing darkness I leave bread out, exitthe bathtub while the water runs.Later my daughter …
My eyes know him soon as they spot him face and skin just like my father’s around thirty no pockmarks yet and darker than his already dark from tanning all day in Camagüey The UMAP has him pick yuca and guayaba cut trees fertilize and weed from head to toe of each day He and …
My mother weeps on the toilet, breasts between her knees.Something chewing its way out—She sits there lowing like a cow in a blue field, head bowed—Stroke my back, she says,& I do, palm coaxing the birth of halfway cells.In the night-light she shudders & grunts, then— wet sounds.My mother’s a biologist.She once held my fingers …
Greenwich, Connecticut 2007When I was a boy—a false boy—language was / scattered: birdseed from the backyard feeder / on the reverend’s tongue. Soft, careful stirring of wings, soft settling / of scripture in the low grass—before / the other boys leapt from their pews / to collect meaning in the pastel bowls / of polos. …