have you ever fallen asleep on it
can you even imagine no ulterior
have you been declared unsafe
only music and love
have you planned to drive around it
singing a cadenza
Even with cancer the dog
has to be fed and the trash
has to be bundled
the empty road ahead—
no gas stations, no rest stops,
not even a phone booth to call for help.
But I keep looking for the core world, a deeper place, that bright bell of sun. We’re not Presbyterian school girls, after all; we’re in the middle of a wake-up call.
I’m struck dumb suddenly by this egg, this enormity.
This immense incomprehensible oval and its lovely silence.
this is our home she says, skin and bones built up with love
we put basil on everything
My husband says he wants to be buried by the sea, like Neruda, so when his eyes can’t see the ocean anymore, his body would still be close to it.
Drifting here on the far side of the moon and sun, she feels strangely at peace. Trigger does, too, in the falling rain and the question of goodbye.
I will be home soon in bed. I will wake up in six hours. I’ll be home in nine minutes.
In a few minutes, predictably, the air brakes gave an angry hiss and the ton upon ton of steel strained to stop the momentum of its own barreling progress. The train finally came to a stop in the open desert.
Looking back, I can only remember the nickname given to the luger at those 2010 Winter Olympic Games in British Columbia: “BAM-BAM!,” they cheered. He was a favorite for gold. I can’t recall which country he was representing, just his…
I’m trying to explain my poems.
Sonnets equal boxes, into which
we place the cat, a gun, & all our problems.
The ground seemed so much farther away than usual. The soles slid on the carpet. She felt like a little girl in her mother’s high heels. She did not feel sexy.
Always late, and always your sleeves carefully folded. A cat knows the sunny spot.
Before I had my son, I thought I was too careless to be a mother. I had a bird for eight years that I’d gotten from a flea market as a gift. His cage was cleaned when my parents told me to clean it, his water bowl goopy and pink.
In the mornings he pulled on the trousers of the day but could not choose between his corn belt and his bible belt.
She asked me, “do you like Miss Donne?
You’re both girls. But my dad says that’s okay.”
Les just sit togeddah, we talk story.
Bum by Aunty sing a song, but fo now goin talk story.
Bout a beudeeful girl who wen bump her hed, jus like you.
she—having regained composure—messaged him: Your mother needs to know you are all right and she foolishly expected an immediate response
What’s needed now is bodies—
when the cold wind blows
Why didn’t I steal you
before doors were barred,
make a camp under the boughs?
we knew you were trouble, in the pits of our stomachs,
or maybe lower…
She waited for a gray-green tentacle to slither up from the water.
Their faces are very close;
it seems he is whispering to her.
So you’re not the Anadyomene — suck it up!
Too much pudica peek-a-boo
So they named you Mona Lisa,
as the song goes,
blather on about your smile.
this anti-Willendorf
bares one swollen breast-bud scored of real clay
Defenestration: to throw something out of a window.
“Baby, everything’s gonna be fine,” he says. “God has a plan for us, and I promise you, it ain’t death by burning.”
my bones a bell and my flesh a bell, my tongue a vibrating rhythm all its carpet own
what if I can’t travel with
because of
oh you know
We fly over a trailer park
with empty slots, above-ground pools,
a Marriott with hourly rates
The run of a horse
is a gallop. Roam, rove
with restraint. Run those hounds,
those errands. Run your eye
down the list.
It was hairless and white, without visible scarring. It looked like there had never been an arm there at all, as if this were just a different way for a body to be constructed. It possessed a peaceful aura, Quinn thought.
There is that much shadow in her, that much dusk of an open earth.
We’re far from the seventeen flavors of hell I run across in the course of my week, things that are just never good: glue traps. outgrown swing sets. waiting rooms.
I wish for a reason
To remain whole
When all I want
Is to be dismantled
When the work is done
there will be more work. That’s what I show
the kids everyday
He wants her to believe he’s not fit for the world, no matter how well she’s tried to raise him, or what tools she’s given him. God is her witness, she’s tried hard.
