Poetry
Ghost mother, today I ate sour cherries on toast and the man cried three times. What is unfeeling, what is monstrous as applied to me? Because I cared for them, I soaked my blouses in the tub. I sat in the sun assessing my insignificant self -inflicted wounds. You pick, he says, and pick—and I […]
I charm myself into a trance and—ta-da! I’m gone again. I’m a film of iridescence. I’m a bubble in a room that shatters if it touches me—everything shiny, shiny, more nothing than air. If asked to speak, someone speaks and they speak from where I used to be. Oh, I think I’m done being a […]
From a deep blue bath bomb with a golden star that smiled glitter. Tonight marks the first day of equinox in glitter. We smoke lazy-cherried American Spirits, arms clacked in glitter. I finger the thick hair on my upper lip, rubbing it in clumps with glitter. The full round turn of my fingertip exhales in […]
At the beach where the Atlantic kisses our feet, my daughter asks me what the ocean will bring to the shore, like it has secrets it has held on to. I say under my breath, probably slaves and I know this is me at my most cynical, a trait my child shouldn’t need to be […]
Forever as if she and I are contesting who’s the more hurt— the one who recalls, or the one who goes blank. Flat fronts of goldenrod robes as we girls soprano-ed for pews of men. Explosion when the neigh- bor boys were paid once to watch us (sweat pouring in mud eyes)—games with chairs, red […]
I began my life as a baby but we won’t begin there. You don’t want the fear to be over-determined. There is a presence absence issue. Stuck with or pushed against silence. The silence around events. The dove event. The raptor event. I have regrets. They are all over me like the weather. Guilt not […]