“Trash-can colored and rusty, it was a car all throat,
all fits and stutters, a guttural language
choked at every breakneck shift of gears,
a devil’s-in-hell kind of loud, so buzz-saw loud
you could feel the fuel catch fire inside it, its inner life burning
with something I was too small to name.”
“This is an elegy
for what can’t be undone—
a sky that sags heavy,
hand over our mouths
that forces us to breathe
with eyes
fingertips
every part we have left.”
“It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth sip of tea this morning that I noticed Miss Nancy Carson was missing her eyebrows. I promptly set the cup down and stared at her across the breakfast table. I wanted to make certain she had not simply hidden her brows under too much white pomade. The girl is at an age where she has begun to prepare her toilette, and painting takes practice to master. But her brows were not covered up. They were gone.”
“I find them in the hollow place—
the friend whose heart collapsed
as the train pulled out,
the one whose daughter
didn’t call to tell me,
the one whose cancer
they said was slow growing
a month ago.”
“I knew who Tim Davis was in high school, but I didn’t introduce myself to him until my mom ran him over with her car. And this is not some kind of “meet-cute” story, where her tires caught his foot as she slowly backed out at the grocery store or something. Rushing home on a drizzly November evening, from a place she should not have been, my mother mowed Tim down as he rode his bicycle to work, paralyzing him below the waist.”
“The bluebirds that should leave each winter
now stay put, even as species after species
goes extinct. But who’d think of things like that
while those bright-backed, grump-faced balls
of brilliance flicker through our yards?”
“Today another patient
chokes: Don’t
let me die—
When her heart stops, there is so much
noise in the room—so many people
swarming, and then things
inserted—
Her legs jerk with every compression.”
“An itch for HE-ness
SHE-ness cannot scratch.
Men are here who are reborn as women,
they swallow pills & take hormone-shots.
He-paint peeled off
so She comes toward void.”
“Dad and Mom got divorced two years ago. Mom says they split up because Dad is selfish and wants to sow his wild oats, two decades too late, and doesn’t want to be burdened by the demands of a family. Dad says they split up because of Sarah. Dad says that the death of a child strips the skin off a marriage, and if the bones underneath aren’t strong, everything falls apart.”
“the women turn pages slowly, so slowly
unsure if that is the vest Katya knitted for uncle
before he went for milk, never came back
each numbered photograph a too-bright gasp of light
the book, a first step with each mass grave
do you recognize this apron? this belt? these boots?”