poetry

  Was it a cloud or a pillar of fire that led you lost people through the desert?   And were you lost, or merely uncertain as I feel nearly every day now?   And when you say “wandered,” do … Read More

  You must think that I forgot or are neglecting you, which is not at all true,   you are often in my thoughts. How to write you. Polycentric. Brazzaville sister.   Daughter (as I am). Two precolonial villages coincided … Read More

  The sea for miles like the table of God. Our powder blew and the sea rushed in.   The mast’s a burning candle offered And I’m the flame that will not last.

  Some say I no longer wear one, dismissing the slip—and here, we’re not talking panniers, dimity pockets, or pantalets with open crotches but   see:  chemise—so mid-twentieth- century that women are reminded: Liz Taylor fulfilled one to lure Paul … Read More

  You are the elbow. You, bone to a point, a rule for movement, marble-   hard and you are palms to pull and pound our only rooms, to palm the keys,   to key our voices to a chorus. … Read More

  Shear back the thorns, the thistles, the body   of rosebushes growing along the fence line. Summer will not give   and the dog is digging up rows of beds,   drought-driven and bare.   We have it backwards: … Read More

    Green shutters—white house.   Paper whites in the weak western light.   Brown mouse and its brown hush   across the stairs, four daughters   brushing long brown hair.  Brown   beer in Black Label cans, black bible … Read More

  I’ve given up many things to the elements: that floor-length red leather trench, my father’s violin. When the storm rolls in, it’s hard to quiet the crew   in my veins, all of them asking how far ‘til shore, … Read More

  As if the extinct thylacine opened its jaws 180 degrees like a book and swallowed Father clean. Those striped haunches glowing in the forest—see   the beast zigzagging with its prey to the cemetery. The cemetery! Father and I … Read More

  Mrs. Sparrow, your one staring eye is blind to the sky. Flattened like a book, you have an attentive fly,   burnished green and gold, decay’s sleek courtier, who sips daintily at your crushed beak.   Someone has tacked … Read More

  Someone left a water bottle on a tiny gravestone.   I’m at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston.   I came to see the tomb of Increase and Cotton.   Someone left a water bottle on a tiny gravestone. … Read More

  When my father left us, my mother became a panther, her eyes slow from medication, hunting an answer   the rooms couldn’t give her. She was angry, but didn’t yell as much. She seemed softer, tranquilized by loss,   … Read More