You taught me how to say and spell my name
On an old wooden dresser at our farm house
You pointed to herbs in the garden, parsley and oregano
We put on old dresses and Dad’s ties

Do your eyes discern my halo? The world at large seems blind.
Affluent obsess on phones, poor scramble to survive.
One group calculates its commerce, one simply stays alive.

Somewhere beyond the order of the sun
I would crouch sullen in the steppe wolf’s lair,
Gather the darkness into bloodlit eyes,
Tune raw sinews to a pitch of rage,
Howl incessant fury to the sky.

In the woods behind her house,
in a season where the world tilts most
from its ball of light,
upon her small part of Earth’s

rounded back —
naked oak branches covered in white:

You’d think 2AM conversations would be nonsensical and funny,
not rational and sober avenues to despair. Round and round
and round we go, down the looped rabbit hole all new methods,
medicines, discoveries have to go to become less… detrimental.

There isn’t such thing as flat emerald and agreeing to a suicide pact with a falsely familiar stranger is not worth the novelty. We are all children of divorce. Olive, teach me the art of being quaint. Show me how to construct the soundproof walls you’ve built for proper use to love as loudly as we do.

I was walking in the hot, still LA heat
That blows nowhere, so your own thoughts begin to circulate
And you go mad
And upon walking on some particularly rocky asphalt,
I lost my footing
And hit the back of my head and heard a
CRAACK

The first strains of the overture
Intrudes on the calm of normalcy.
Several measures of gentle breeze
Slowly crescendo into true wind.
The key and rhythm suddenly change,
Then revert to the original.

Sister Mary Rose (so young she could’ve been your actual sister)
marched you and her other seventy-two second-grade students
(no teacher aides, no volunteer parents, just the good nun)
eleven blocks west toward the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge
to the palatial Hobart Theater

Whatever anyone
tells you know
it is possible
common in fact
to exist
in one place in
another two time
transience one
location contains
many dancing

Who was the first to try
an olive ripe from the tree,
the paltry flesh over stony seed
so bitter it must be poison?

Who learned the magic
to make it succulent?

Like a willow
branch that must rise
and sway
with the evening
wind, she raises her hand
and runs her fingers
through her hair.

What are these fragile little lightning dreams?
The apparitions of million ideas?
Universal clues disguised as flashing silver fins?

Fine-boned and slick,
fish swim through dark-eyed waters.

Traces—faint or bold, visible, or not—left by scalpel, scandal, scurrilous tongues, the scalding steam from a cast-iron kettle, the scolding tones in a mother’s voice, the screams of a child scared straight.

Like the sky that shines
because of dawn,
I shine
because of a pair of sneakers
wrapped in a package
sent from longing.

They have flown
across several oceans.

The life lived in the body
Was the blood, warm in the veins.
White halos of icy breath,
Frost caught in the sportsground lights.
How you ran and played hard for the team.

Leda carries so many
swanlike things
inside her body.

King-daughter, Sparta’s
Wife, she was made sturdy
for transaction.

Have you ever seen a man,
made into a beast?
Have you ever watched men
change into something else—
Entirely at Desire’s goad,
Did you know any woman
Can transform a man

for some
there is always
the split.
the sea parting like a zipper,
unveiling this vulnerable heart.
it might’ve started at the first sign of trouble but also might’ve never started.

Papa nearly kills a pigeon
with a rock.
That means, your own name
can be used
against you
& that is the way a mother can carry hope
without its burden. Then,
grandma’s fingers
pinch
my flawless cheeks like salt. She drafts
a boat

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep,
and if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take.
Mother changed the last words
of my nightly prayer in attempt
to stave me from the futility of
how we all end—in an attempt
to save me from her.

The oncologist instructs you to lie face down
like you’re going to get a massage
except you’re not going to get a massage.
And you think of the thousands of dollars
you spent while hooked on erotic massage
during the final years of your third marriage.

Martha would read the newspaper more than once;
box scores, her favorite, and cartoons that made her laugh.
Small stories with big fame: mothers lifting cars
and the obituaries of the not so named

I dig for shelter
in a homespun
endometrial layer

each new moon
like the first rain
each crimson drop
seething…