The kitchen table was where my mother taught me about the world. No,it wasn’t, becausethere was no kitchen table.She always cooked outside, close to a wall, with firewood.Until one day the wind brought down the fence on her back.After the bricks came hard on her, she disappeared into the rubble. Her back held bruises.It was …
You have to say Here! as loud as you can so your teacher knows that you’re here.You can hide anywhere. The only rule is bestill and quiet until the teacher calls your name. “Is everyone quiet?” I ask my daughter.“Sometimes,” she says. I want to knowthe names of the loud children, the ones who might …
It would be easier to be kind if we knewWe were members of an ensemble that’s destined To perform the romance we’re now performing Again and again till each has actedEvery part in the plot, high and low, at least once.Easier for the king to careAbout working conditions in the palace scullery If he knew …
In truth, I wish my birthstone was any other green—a granite oval furred with moss, flint effaced by lichen: each proof of water.What does a peridot prove? My birth was in a sea of sweat. My mother, milkless, fevered dry by August heat. I drank water and dwindled—ribs withering.When I didn’t cry, I coughed. As …
I did not come to curse this plot of earth, brickwork bounce-house stricken with resting bitch face, or its Pandora’s box of kid-feet, continually thunderingback and forth on the fourth floor. Dear long-emptied birdfeeder,ghost, and broken screen, this season’s token cliffhanger requires I pack my things and disperse into a cold front of engine rips …
Whose words are these,refusals astonishing my tongue like broken teeth,how many have I swallowed bad days, allowing the condemned gas station up the block to be labeled baggage, the way I have my debt-collection phone calls, or divorce,or my apartment’s warping floor where figurines and diaper boxes idle?A sprawl this extensive breeds empty pockets, and …
backdrops isn’t exactly what that Elder ever claimed to love, but the wanting at the heart ofevery want, this seeingthe Dreamtime flow, change course, drought up, stop at who-damned-the-river. Oh crucialterrifying eternal spots blotted out where the winding water nowhits land out of reach where women gave birth for so long,daughters and sons come to …
My grandmother whispers the rosary, her dresser an altarof Kleenex, perfume bottles, an empty vase. The altarcleaned of VHS tapes where she once watched crowsand gulls cloak the sun, where Rosemary’s womb is an altar.There is too much horror in the daytime for her sleeplessnights. Politicians say my family strangles geese on the altarsof dining …
My grandmother at first refused, but the truth slippedthrough like sun breaking a pond’s icy face—there was a girl wearing a pearl gown who bridge-bent,a snowdrop on the church steps, and said Erzulie stepped inside.Wreathed in Communion buds, the girl almost drownedkissing her reflection in an alabaster baptismal font.The goddess shivers into a bride who …
Maybe it’s wrong to be a person who can be made happy by a lamp. This is an old notebook, from spring 2011, but I know exactly which lamp I had in mind.The question has haunted me for some time.If you’re this sort of person, your mind will fly past wrong, even ignore happy, to …