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Handles
it’s your handles I say to him as I wrap the quilt over our shoulders it’s the bend of your body at the hip where your usually prominent bones are shrouded in soft skin and flesh it’s the way my fingers dig in as I pull you backward onto my thighs onto my lap if ...
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On My Imaginary Wedding Day
On my imaginary wedding day the sponge cake won’t collapse when my brother bumps it dancing. I’ll wear orange shoes with slick soles that spin on a thin dime, and I will spin and spin and spin. On my imaginary wedding day and all up to it I will dream of warrior poets. I will ...
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In August
In August Max bought a sprawling new car with fat tires. Daddy said your brother drives too fast flat out since the day he was born. Daddy wrote a new song. He played it, and I taught Nan to dance. Daddy sent a tape of samples to a man in Nashville. The man said Daddy ...
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East & Coast
A busy eastern city and a coastal urban sprawl meet one night in a bar. They have never met before, built as they are on opposite ends of the earth. East has butched up, hair short, breasts bound. She’s terrified and arrogant, center of a punch-drunk universe of smoke. She has pulled on her best ...
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Way Up
Our island is small as a postage stamp, my Mamma laughs, our island could fit in the palm of one hand. We have one tree and one field, a little house, a harbor ringed with granite stones. Our island clings to the green coast, clings like meat to a mussel shell. On Saturday morning my ...
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Ah Oh
The waves on Jerusalem beach spread burnt orange fingers, fall back, spread a silver scallop shell in the long loving curve of the sand. The lights go out in Snug Harbor tucked into the sunset, slip off one by one by one. My brother locks his door and leaves his porch light on; I can ...
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Pie
You have my light-white hair, I notice. Not yet reached the tricky age of seven, so perhaps like me you will be blonde past eight and blonde again at eighty. “Nan, your skin is paper,” and I laugh and show you how the flesh of my fingertips kneads and holds impressions of a fork, like ...
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Bayou
In the marble sculpture garden of the Met, a grey moth lady sits in the soup of her own echoes. She has caterpillar silk hair, alligator skin fingers, crabbed apple fists. She has grace and crackling paper. She splashes ink on the page and it comes out in the shapes of snapping turtles and muddy ...
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Small Town Boy
Small town diva boy, his mascara is smeared and he’s lovely. He flinches like a quick thing wrapped up against the chill, And catches a ride on the highway from a man named Luke with a pickup truck and snow tires. He says he’s got no name at all. He’s thin as a metal ruler’s ...