Interstellar space sounds like my finger on a wine glass— whining, high and sharp, a choir we cannot identify. I’ve listened to the recordings. The plasma oscillates around our intrusive satellite and sings a peculiar song. If I ever made it to that frontier would that sound cut into my pink brain like a knife? […]
i. girl. a small word. too small. but girl they called her, and girl she claimed. she practiced her girlhood with heat–stricken hair, sheared nails, scrubbed skin. she baptized herself with fat wrung from beans and battered into butter. she oiled her joints with poise, scented her flesh with propriety, and clothed herself in performance. […]
At three a.m. my ribs ache as if molten iron pools into and over the symbols etched in bone. I cradle these calcium bars that embrace my lungs, my heart, your soul. Please, Bisabuela, sea paciente. Fighting only tightens this curving, gaping cage and wounds us both. Would you salt the valleys of my face? […]
One of us looks like the Fisher King, the fog–moored curator of lost causes solitary as a heron where the sky runs to salt, a line in the water for any hope that happens by. Our hands are cut with hooks and feathers, the ache in our thighs pulling like the brackish tide; grief pearls […]
If our thirteenth child is a girl, all her twelve brothers must die, so that she may be very rich, and the kingdom hers and hers alone. from Household Tales, collected by the Brothers Grimm. I never knew their names. Only twelve coffins in one straight line, filling the cold grey crypt. I […]
I promise myself this moment, The stained–glass murmur of angels, the crisp Scent of fresh dreams Turned like furrows in the mind, The green and growing sorrow that lodges Deep in the breast. I taste the memory of you Like an oath on the tongue, like every song Ever wept into the night. Don’t look […]
Speak to us in silk, they say speak to us in milk, be pillow–soft, be satin–smooth be home–spun sugar sweet. We part our lips. We breathe our breaths. We bite our tongues and swallow blood knot stones into our stomachs, heave and spit red salt where words should be, stitch shut our mouths with stubborn […]
“as old as old is able to be and be there still” Anne Sexton You say, I was so beautiful once but I never knew that ancient beauty only this body like a forest fire like a field of bones its boundaries impossible to distinguish from the bed sheet. You say, I wish they’d let […]
For Delia and Ellen You’ll know me by my walk between the market stalls, by my shambling gait and by my fur–gown of rust embroidered with nettle and seedpods of dandelion, buttoned in sweet clover from the riverbanks. I am a riddler in a pinecone crown, I speak honey, but don’t let the bees buzz […]
for Elise Matthesen Here to this island of flowers and bones, not many come but my song draws them like the riptide a drowning sailor or the noose a broken heart. The great ships founder, break their treasure at my feet— oxhides of copper, black–figured wine–bowls, amphorae smashed hollow as the chests of their crew. […]