More on: poetry

Has birth ever peeled you apart Has birth ever hollowed you out For I have seen a woman being transfigured Into lips her water breaking like the first Ocean spilling between the thighs of creation And then between those lips her firstborn crowning Like a tongue that dips to test the light and scalds Have…

like a slap, like a bone, like a spice, like a thought gone still in the light, another kind of sorrow, a kind of life, a cheek stroked, then freckled. Its rhythm amounts to injury, to a small space. No singing. Just a sack of air, a soiled shirt, more sermonizing that picks away at…

Like a dark miracle, they sleep, two am at a truck stop outside Indianapolis; my husband of three cities, three years— flycatcher, scrub jay, kingfisher; our baby daughter, little chickadee, pale wrinkle, my inkling. A motherless girl who now mothers, I am loved twice, two orchids, two glimpses of the afterlife, two clear-wing butterflies, two…

However innocent your life may have been, no Christian ought to venture to die in any other state than that of the penitent. —————————————————–—Saint Augustine I have been sodden with wine. I have been confused by wine. I have been lied to by men, And yet, I lie down upon such men, Still and willing…

Night girl, your book is full. You have drawn all the pictures. You have seen many weepers. Rainbows held your sky in place, and sorrows bloomed about you like flowers. Moons floated on your lakes and washed them. Stars lit your river beds, and songs adorned your chest with garlands. When a bird sings when…

Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness, long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and fill the sky, long after bodies tangle dance and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and…

I’m not dead so what do I know. It’s a box of bone I’m in. I work the crash site, push glass bits to the ditch with a broom. A swift hit of spring stuns me, but what’s that. My soul’s not cracked in half for its gold yet. It might be bone in there,…

…when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and take you where you do not want to go. ————————————————–—John 21:18 The woman with the invisible stigmata sits day by day in the gelateria and wonders why no one else can see what she cannot, though she knows her…

Under the catastrophic dark, the comet splintering the sky with its ancient grief, under the splay-handed palms, under drinks glowering dark in globes of glass, under the tender humidity, the phosphorescent surf, under the calls of nightjars chuckling up from the ground, under the ticking aloe under the moon’s absence, under, under, under. Under the…

I I watch them enter, lined up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher, counting, passes, one pushes and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in 1942, I tell the behaved ones, orderly and under orders, and I’m just about to start that terrible…