Teachers pat me like a loaf
especially the chalk-dusted
I learn early who has authority

Behaving is more important
than the Theory of Relativity
The length of my hems a critical topic

whispers the woman sitting next to me.
I’ve seen her here before–drinking alone,
her skin heavy with loss.
This close, the taste of her regret is pungent,
and is swallowed with each sip of my vodka-tonic.

I was nine. My parents came home hollow from the hospital.
My mother sobbed in wild animal cries, violent splotches
of purple spread from under her skin, her chest
her cheekbones tainted; my father silent
slumped in his easy chair, his neck gray-yellow
half of his face buried in clenched raw knuckles.

My love and I drive south
For seven minutes of darkness.
During solar eclipse, the sun proposes,
A sparkling rim and white-hot stone,
We drive for margaritas, the blue Pacific,
to make love when Orion rises…

In summer months
sun and moon rise from the same spot,
a point northeast of my porch, the place I welcome morning.

A hawk rises on a prairie thermal,
its diminishing black shadow below,
its eye wed in magic to a single spot.

I step in to feel promptly like the prey,
wobbly with hypnosis by gazing above
me, a disfavored adversary to a predator.

Once we followed the others on all fours,
contributing trails through grass and brush
to favorite trees and watering holes
before our spines thrust us up on two feet…

A sea wife,
my mother didn’t have time
to pace a widow’s walk,
searching for a sail on the horizon.

She was too busy
pinning up sheets to dry,
weeding the garden…

Here they come, on they go,
One by one, in a row,
misanthropic phantoms
Drifting by me on the street…
snuffed candelabrums….
No warmth to meet…
Incense del Dia de Muertos

We have no heat left for showers
and the washing up. The instructions
to relight the pilot are detailed,

patient—but leave us no warmer.
Grease hangs on our pans.
How quickly we dry ourselves…

Commuting, standing
in a half-empty
subway car, reading news
on my phone, an article

on two competing
theories of consciousness,
triggers a memory…