More on: Poetry

She reads their names aloud, 
men, beloved to some, 
lynched in Little River County,
Arkansas, each appellation
engraved on a six-foot 
steel slab

I made you a promise I intended to keep:
I will cover my body; I will keep your words near
like the pearl at the curve of my ear. 

It wasn’t long before I began
pinching myself for fat, for acne, learned
to hate my body in a swimsuit, in clothes.

I pace the cracked suburban paving.
Fiats gust, lizards flick, Jesus

Christ: that ankle-speck of a rat hound 
bashing the railings, baying.

It wasn’t a death exactly, though I’ve been
undone by deaths the same way.

Once a week he holds me against him like a child and I inhale wood and horse and earth, sometimes  sweat (not sharp with the agony of hurry but warm,   like a tree trunk seeping sap on a sunny day); I keep  my eyes closed, as if afraid time will shift like a rocking boat beneath my feet, and that…

God the God of the cement silo, sunset-stained,
and the conveyor
                                         running through the night.

I was born out of terror,
             horn-caught and tangled,

                            pulled from the brush
with a cry of thorn and leaf.

In Leonardo’s  
Annunciation, 
is there a dove?  
I certainly can’t 
find one—but  
Leonardo is famous 
for hiding things,  

In the sanctuary, I repeated a childhood prayer 
I knew some of the words to. I’d skip  
a lecture and want to skip them all—