Poetry

bring the cigarettes out, and drinks for you and Dan, left the Diet Cokes there, sweating on the ledge. Tonight you’ll allow me to stay for no other reason than to listen. You knew what I would become. But I can’t remember words now,

One moment of quiet and I’ll be able to think about stitches without my skin crawling out from under me, away, like leather on my body.

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. / There are already enough names. –– Lao Tsu

to thank the pines for letting the snow melt for letting grass grow between their feet

In the middle of surviving you, I sat on the sidewalk outside the bookshop that paid me too little, sterilized a safety pin with the flame of a lighter and stabbed it through my right big toe.

I can count the number of times we touched on two hands plus two feet, plus your hands and your feet.

The surprise clusters of brown pears punctuate the leaves. My children burst down the pickers’ lane their feet smashing the rotten fruit into a fragrant mess, a prayer in earth. It is all too much.

A rook snags a branch in the sycamore outside my bedroom window. That’s not what I’m thinking about.

our wanderings conjure desire, the selfish kind—hunger to ask for more without bothering to hear the answer.

Leaning bicycles on old iron fences. The kids grow out their bowl cuts. The merry-go-round weeps behind the Baptist church.