Tell me where I’ll be hanged. The elm? The gallows? The balcony of my lover’s home? Don’t let my students watch, don’t let the girls see. I haven’t yet taught…
It was my first skeleton, the once birch forest now bare Look, the command like water dripping from our mother’s mouth as we all turned our heads to drink from…
When father wanted to take a new wife, he sang mother her panegyrics, bought her the finest boubous from a local shop, traced her wrinkled face, her feverish hands, then…
“I have always long to suffer for God and His Church” – St. Catherine of Sienna When you told the Pope to “be a man,” what did you know of…
Scattered peels of shine that lie on glassy water, shiver out of reach. Blue light filters neighbourhood rooms as you walk the dog, shadows lamppost to lamppost. Napped dark against…
There is a scar on your inner thigh, that looks like a bear, and when I traipse my index finger too close, you go rowr. Always Ray, always. I walked…
The gamblin’ Granny next to me pulls levers lets the wheels roll, smack BAR BAR BAR or the cherries she prays for. My cherries are in the maze. Let me…
When you are broken, you can feel the cracks and fissures with the tip of your tongue, you run your fingertips over the gaps reading the braille of what’s hurt…
for lillaree she was getting her doctorate on the last island she owns in my memory’s receding fogbank. it’s been thirteen years and i’d always figured she’d be dead by…
A part of your body ached, the doctor pressed it. Said—fine here, take these, Sylvia. But you replaced the pills with music. Fine. You knew enough to be a woman,…
and they will bring you medicine, bald spots beige suits, the other ones, averting eyes, grind teeth between pink cotton polka dots. You sniff their bouquets poppies, powderized to chase…
I’ll tell you a tale that begins upon a time when I was a wee slip like you, loves, the backyards and vacant lots dripped lousy with lightningbugs. I called…
He used to come up behind me, tell me I’d make some man a fine wife. Didn’t know the kind of man I wanted, if I wanted a man at…
Listen: it’s raining ash. The one holding his nose tight in blueish kleenex is your dead neighbor’s only certified son, heir to eleven thumbs and a language made of…
Mamma says when tears salt my face and every slap of ocean rises up to close my eyes. She squeezes me tight. So tight I taste the sweat of breast…
Behold the Lamb of God as chasing downhill butterflies behind its own lolloping head it croons in yellow tides like flowers flushed red when pressed, when cut. White wool turns…
Up to your elbows in yeast and flour, you smiled, hummed followed no recipe texture of the dough your own small empire My father bit his tongue though the muscles…
having come far you feel half-begun the tree’s leaves bud & bloom just as they had to all along i hadn’t eaten subsequence in ages i hadn’t aged since i…
I know my mother loves me. She tucks me in each night, puts the thick wool blankets over my face, her voice wasp-like as she reads The Little Match Girl.…
the stairwell smells like a barbeque joint tonight and also a joint; lightbulb on the last flight of stairs is out and if the broken doorknob at the bottom of…
We hold the slender threads we find, spin and triple-twine them –– mitten strings from the abandoned nurseries, tails of ditched kites, cement-stayed vines. We take comfort. We make comforters…
We sat side by side, a feather of air between us, the first time together in months. I wondered if you were imagining the salt of my tongue, the bite…
After Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” Call the roller of straightjackets, The muscular one, and bid him sling In Dixie cups cylindric pills. Let the nurses needle in such…
Glance, without words, but with averted eyes. Clouds, with wind, but without silvered rain. Longing, without logic, but with blood singing. Header photograph © Andrew Hall.
Our smallest hands pulled rattlesnakes from the weeds. They were infants like us. Pads of our index fingers patted their doglike heads, we laughed. They hugged their bodies ‘round our…
