the moon cuts through the dark
you trace small circles
across the top of my hand
with your middle finger
All in Poetry
the moon cuts through the dark
you trace small circles
across the top of my hand
with your middle finger
men call the golden steppes of russia
death on a rocky crag
how many blessings to see this land
blue like Drano / sun-washed / sitting / tested /rippled midsection / conspired against / harmless / bonded to the wall / between his lips / nothing to hold it
But then again, I have big hands.
So I go for the little things,
so I can love a lot of things.
& isn't that the trouble with boys
like us we keep our love trapped in
our mouths everything was full
to bursting your left hand my right
hand blissfully glutted with lambs
the floors of memory are glass, which means
the medicine isn’t working, which means
i am back on the floor, which means
it is july, which means
the cherries are in bloom
last night
before sleep
she drew pictures on my back
with her fingers
a test of my spacial recognition
Something stops you now. You said too much
& it got you into trouble. The shadow & old pain
that kept you awake shelter your feelings
of revenge.
And the black sugar
We call also ash
And the outline of stone
We say is another
Kind of desire
I can fall asleep to
the rattling of windows,
the collection of sirens growing
in Yorùbá, a father is a name &
the left hand is taboo. one cannot offer
water with the left hand or sleep
facing upward. at night, a witch
will sit on your chest. a knife tearing
into a knife.
and she wonders
if they’ve said all the words
in thirty years together
still I could swear I sensed his tide
tugging elsewhere I suppose he felt
a need to offer me some swaying
of water so he showed me the lagoon
The distant night opens like a pearl / fan, a skirt, a heart,
a drop of salt. The peasants who picked the beans
are / sleeping— they will turn into a billion sunflower
seeds
not all milkmen can know how the wretched can live off spoilage.
Ask me where to find need. I am ringmaster of my own sinkings.
Last winter I sat cross legged in the empty house at night.
I sing like crystal. I am perfectly cut Czechoslovakian glass.
The orchard is dying, the branches all charred with fire blight.
The sand in my hair,
the sand in my shoes near the satin-coco lining— a dolphin washed ashore,
your mouth the memory of a rooster on top a hanging silence…
We drove to Washington, DC, waving
our hands through the sage haze so we could
see the road, stretched our legs at the Museum of Tolerance
looking for whales.
It is terrible luck to carry a woman on a ship like this.
I carry this woman here, hidden, so there were two aboard.
The sail runs up, with a white flag, made of lace and satin,
tied at the neck with pearls and something blue.
Revenge is one
of the first stories
my grandmother
read to me
when she warned my mother
I was a magnet for
impurities.