poem

“That afternoon, I pretended
to be a cat—tabby, kinked tail.
And the finches behaved
accordingly.”

“Still awake believing our silence might leave us,
desperately needing to make ourselves heard,
every girl told a story before parents came for us.”

“I imagined us drinking tea
sugared with honesty,
laughing till we turned soft
as fallen apples.”

“Always, I begin
with nothing and too much
to say.”

“Some days
almost everything’s about sex, and maybe
this as well: groan of old boards, joists
and beams remembering, music
of breaking glass.”

“a white moth arrives rising and falling
on the warm breeze, lingers on the headstone

then on my bare arm, clinging as if
searching for moist skin or the scent of me.”

“I stare out the window
over the sink, the citrus soap promising
something pure as we shelter in place.
A rolling fog smokes the green
grass. The vixen glides her grizzled gray
between orchard and rock wall border.”

“Milk passes through me like liquid moons,
wet stars on her tongue. She sucks

till I’m emptied of all the white
cells in my celestial body.”

“Because this is endearment not indictment
I’ll say that I admire the commitment you’ve recently made
to eating your berries with the knife used to clean them
rather than using a spoon.”

“Bored, my children open me up, like a fridge,
to find out what’s inside. I glow and show them
leftovers, mostly, some of them over a week old.”