Poetry

Fridays, I drove Route 119 at sunset toward your old home, turning off at the potholed road to clatter through meadows dotted with cows and cornflowers,

1. Semiquincentennial I woke to find the big tree down,the maple I had hung from as a childon whose branches I’d assumedmy daughter’s daughters would swing free.There was no storm. I had not hearda crack, and yet I woke to…

My mother proceeded from this father. The sermon droned. She opened a hymnal and climbed inside, came out singing new songs I never heard her mother sing. Holy mysteries

I remember the movement of the body is policed by the space one inhabits. I remember poetry, too, is a constructed space, with rules attached to it. The rule for this poem is not to break.

As if to feel for rain he turns his palms upward, while outside the streetlamps bloom like night flowers To be honest, I had notexpected such a request from him, at least: Tightly And so,I cross the thick string over…

Notes Toward the Great Floridian Novel I Ruth dusted the taxidermy alligatorwhere it stood menacing the front windowof her mother’s tourist trap shop in Alachua.Behind the gator hung Hawaiian shirts,other gators’ claws made into backscratchers,and American flag glass breakersin the…

Self Portrait of Boy as Venus de Milo The way the light bounces offthe skin covers blemish and bruise. In the light, the bodyis a shiny bronze. The shadowbetween the chest gives the contour of small breasts. If notfor the…

Grandma was murdered at 42 when gun violence was uncommon. Mom had to identify the body. The coroner pulled the sheet down without warning. The corpse stared back at her. Mouth wide open. How could mom even take care of…

There shouldn’t be cops in this poem.If we can’t be abolitionist in a poem, then where?But it’s July and there are cops everywhere & yesterdaythere was a beautiful balding man on west 14th,stooping & sweating like Frank O’Hara, dead 59…

Afterwarmth Sunlight staring coolly from the windowsill. Electric hush.White pulsing disco bass skipping from the street, the soupedup radio. Escape across a wakenight. O swooping garrulous lightninglines, O ice and melt and rising tide, O lavender flakes skyscrapedagainst the sunset—what…

Dibé be’ iiná From a Diné perspective, goats and sheep are emblematic of womanhood. My great-aunt would winter with sheep deeper in the canyons, move with them, care for the flocks. When I was a girl, my grandmother herded our…

Everyone I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast, that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter, overflowing.