More on: Poetry

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture,
overtaken by another giddiness.

We will be the young tufts of spring. 
My shadow will lay itself down over yours, reader.
We will not cut ourselves open any longer.  

The orchard blooms, 

and strangers tend, in wooded plots (or tombs), 
blue nightshade, to the bitter end of gene. 

I too half-curled, half-clutched
in bedclothes, writing the light full
then fitful as it ascends into cloud drift,
warm snarls of will among fluid states

No thing made 
or unmade, or born or yet to be, can separate us from the Love 
that drew us forth from weave to know the weave and return to it. 

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.