it’s such a pale gray the body / of a person broken down / into ash
“To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly. ”
“To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly. ”
Sometimes when I descend the stairs, I carry sugar cubes in my / sweating palms and barely escape with blood on my knuckles.
The art monster ate my second baby / and the third and fourth one after that. / I wrote their flesh away in pen and ink, / my paper powdered with the fine bone dust / of their white teeth.
by the lazy / fisherman of my / mother’s ghost. She / pulls me gentle. / She pulls me / slow.
She likes to go out in the darkness / and make soft sounds, her slip-on Keds kneading / the gravel…
thirteen is patience, fourteen a chore, fifteen the / mirror for sixteen, who went out dressed like a whore
I SLIPPED OUT / CLAD IN GARLIC SKIN, PUT ONE FOOT / IN THE FOREST AND IT MADE NO SOUND.
my head is a house with windows and a door / my face is a curtain to keep me warm
When I speak, she hears me / muffled but voluminous, / like Jonah listening inside the whale…
the boots so worn his feet are / slouched on one edge of each sole, / so if you unlaced them, they would / fall away, no bones.
they say it is death, but also a place to live, if you have gills, if / you are a mermaid, which I am, of course.
a bird’s beak knocking on a nearby tree, last drips of precipitation landing dull but satisfied on the soaked tops of leaves…
Sarah is lying on her back on the hot pavement, her spine stretched along the double yellow lines of the road in front of her house. We are both silent, listening for the sound of cars. The heat hums. Grasshoppers click from stem to stem. In a few days, a tractor will cut and bale hay in the distance, its engine drowning out any oncoming cars, but today it is silent and private, the two of us alone on the road.
Some days, it’s as if my mother never died at all, I simply haven’t seen or spoken to her in three years.