Cincinnati Review

Red-tailed hawk Redring from a milk jugencountered on the MisheMokwa Trail But it wasn’t that plasticpiece of dread No The redof someone’s pony-tail holder something shedas involuntarily as redblood cells Mariafatigued unknowing blamingage I blamed some unknownhiker careless I thought droppingtrash amidst the blacksage and juniper Whodrinks milk on ahike I should havethought but didn’t …

At six, I didn’t know more than riding a Schwinn and climbing banyan trees. “Do you believe in God?”the two blonde girls from four doors down asked as our bikes circled endlessly in figure eightsaround each other. Well, I suppose one girl askedwhile the other simply rode, silently and blonde. They weren’t twins, but a …

Getting older, you never got old.A gold mine of girl: doe-eyed, sold. In front of the shutter’s clicking,you did what he said, lens-fucking,muttering No hope for women. Piano to camera-ready, plucked at eighteen,barely steady, heavy with mood. Suddenly, you made scarce, laid low.Suddenly, a surprise: you arrivedagain, new world, sullen girls telling tales. Here’s what …

in the South, a body might do that, orit makes a body feel some type of way.Here rounding at the knees to support the body as it carries my keepingsup the hill; wrists in coats as a bodywalks around the city; picked a hair from my shoulder, but it wasn’t my hair.A body can confide. …

When I was a child, everything was perfect all the time. I was long planned for and executed with great care: my mother dressed me in tailored suits, flounced petticoats, buttons shaped like clocks, sheepskin coats, electric-blue felt, coordinated layers of hot pink and purple, drop waists, sequins, Peter Pan collars with scalloped edges, oversize …

from section Four: No One Who Played with the Rolling Stones Ever Lived on Norris Crescent Even five months, six months, seven months later, you still live among boxes. You arrange them into makeshift walls, section off the part of the living room with your desk. This is your study, itself like a giant cardboard …

Her name is Miranda, and she’s an Engler on her father’s side, raised to be proud of the good her family did during a troubled time. To this day, at every family gathering, an ancient Engler is helped to their feet to tell the story of the weeks, months, years after the Battle of Gettysburg, …

The uniquely bright-blue sky, the grass, butterflies, and turtles in the poem are all part of a world that reimagines the typical relationship between lovers, but also between nature and the body.

At each level of poetic craft, Washington draws a stark contrast between the speaker’s deliberate reflections on home-making, on love, and other children’s frantic consumption in a fast food restaurant.