each summer for ten years / he planted one thousand trees
“To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly. ”
“To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly. ”
there is the white belly of a hawk bending / over the ford dealership on central avenue
if the wind was down, you could hear / tires on gravel from a mile back / standing outside our house
I have / picked you from bodies, finger-brushed the crumbling / petals of your shed housings
Sometimes when I descend the stairs, I carry sugar cubes in my / sweating palms and barely escape with blood on my knuckles.
The art monster ate my second baby / and the third and fourth one after that. / I wrote their flesh away in pen and ink, / my paper powdered with the fine bone dust / of their white teeth.
by the lazy / fisherman of my / mother’s ghost. She / pulls me gentle. / She pulls me / slow.
She likes to go out in the darkness / and make soft sounds, her slip-on Keds kneading / the gravel…
thirteen is patience, fourteen a chore, fifteen the / mirror for sixteen, who went out dressed like a whore
I SLIPPED OUT / CLAD IN GARLIC SKIN, PUT ONE FOOT / IN THE FOREST AND IT MADE NO SOUND.
my head is a house with windows and a door / my face is a curtain to keep me warm
When I speak, she hears me / muffled but voluminous, / like Jonah listening inside the whale…
the boots so worn his feet are / slouched on one edge of each sole, / so if you unlaced them, they would / fall away, no bones.
they say it is death, but also a place to live, if you have gills, if / you are a mermaid, which I am, of course.