I jumped against the sky expecting I would find another sky. A subtlety to sky.I wanted to get to know the sky better. I wanted to breathe in the air. The sky as a blank space.Or maybe the opening to a decent conversation.If you’re using a camera you can pose against the sky and people …
Do savor that peculiar sweetness of seaweed flowing like sleep in the brackish current.They will not always be this way, the land and the sea. There will be too much salt and not enoughfresh water in the estuary. The sea and river will meet, and the river will give itself up by the mouth as …
Soft as a Claude painting, the yellow sky tonight— trees in the parking lot still thick, though the air, yes, has an edge, the honey was solid in the jarwhen I opened it this morning, found a single ant frozen in the dunes, stunned by sweetness.Can you really die of sweetness? Hardto say yes, though …
There was a black reflecting pool in the center of the garden. Guarding it, a pair of lion statues at the top of the steps, looking down.Pink azaleas gone frothy by the pool’s edge, then tiers of boxwood, pines— I know because of the photographs, my attempts to take.Something in the water let it be …
Nothing lingers on the lips like a death song, my mother says, while shredding cassavaand invoking the spirits— Celia Cruz José Martí—or singing blood verse, a church lady working the line, refugee intake.Celia rolling pride through a gapin her teeth, a cry that is palm tree splitmiddle-of-night lightning,and my mother, hands full of seashell witchcraft,hands …
To understand what it would be like to remove my clothesas painters do in portraits of themselves I imagine I’m the woman who knows her body no longer belongs to the young artistwho painted herself before she had children, before her topography was changedby forces erosive as water and wind, and yet she goes on …
I hear a voice from the mountain.I hear words in trees, wild flowers speaking softly, summer remembering winter,the moon hiding in the forest. Someone running, not my brother, not the moon swimming in the lake, not the lake breathing in the trees. A moth clings to my hair.Stars open windows in the trees.I have seen …
name is a windy thing quiet down a hall leaks through hinges does it want to be caught?I don’t know, tipped fangs, fire-points— want to be caught?I think people bundle a name with them from place to place in a basement, a bottleof winda bottle of turn-it-overI have so much holler in me
Gam said you’ll talksomeday, you’ll tell your own hi girl, hi spoon, my ear saidwhere is your applesaucea thumb knowsbye, tell the door for the step hi, that lift-footGam’s sheeny dress setting me on the grass blades bounce under my legssquirrels chuckle with each what-I-want
I will be gone soon, and with me, summer. These warm breezes fleeting; the beauty I have is the beauty of all things that disappearbefore you know you’ll miss them.Each mood—sultry and scorching, mild and balmy— changeable as the rise of the moon’s face,one moment blue over cornfields, anotherorange over the treetops, or red dropping …