Election
When I first saw that my mother was running for mayor I was in the grocery store. It was the morning and I wasn’t doing too well and the check-out girl was wearing this big blue pin with my mother’s big white face on it.
You Swallow a Super Moon and a Doctor You Have Never Met Prescribes Prednisone
Last week I / courted the moon from a stop sign.
cleanliness, (un)godliness
we were plunged into the river / and made holy the pale man
The Kudzu Eaters
In the old days, we burned the bodies of fossils to keep warm.
Forbidden Birth
I found you bitty in a snap pea, plucked you out and swallowed you whole, / rivered your body through my insides and grew it quietly. What bad men? we say.
Moss
Down here at the bottom of the year, the greenest thing is moss.
like every good yellow catholic woman, i plan my funeral 60 years in advance
and on the eighth day, my grandfather’s church organ fell down heaven’s / winding staircase & became a persimmon tree the size of my fist.
The Moon at Noontime
Stuck in the basement where the TV was, out of Mom’s way, I’d pinch the well-timed edge and prolong the pull-away, the cling of flesh where the glue most adhered, the release, the skin’s snap back to itself.
In the Five
My lawyer asks if I’m ready to listen to all five of our 911 tapes.
The Space of Continuous Decline
I'll give you until midnight, she said, and I could tell she meant it. She opened her eyes wide so that her mascaraed lashes stood out like the rays of small black suns.