off the marsh brushing them:
a sound you will never again hear.
The maple is waving little russet
hands. Long brown scaled buds
line the beech twigs. Spring
explodes into hundreds of daffodils
on the hillside that was yours.
Tulips strut their brilliance bowing
to the sun where you will no
longer pass. My tears are
brief years after you died. Still
my thoughts are bouquets like
the red tulips I can never lay
on your invisible grave.
they are always poking at things.they might touch me.I said yes.Food grew cold on the table.he said, burn your body.it is not clean and smells like sex.it rubs my mind sore.I said yes.I love you, I said.That’s very nice, he saidI like to be loved,that makes me happy.Have you cut off your hands yet?
the pit, the cave where the sun lies downand threatens never to rise,when despair descends softly as the snowcovering all paths and choking roads:then hawkfaced pain seized youthrew you so you fell with a sharpcry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.My father heard the crash but paidno mind, napping after lunchyet fifteen hundred miles…
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazassome woman is dragging in with three kids hung off hershrieking their simple urgency like gulls.She’s supposed to pay for each of themand the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.Sometimes a woman in a uniform’s on dutyblack or whatever…
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawingmilk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.You feed me, I try to feed…
umber and scarlet, when sunsetmarks the horizon with slow fireand the black silhouettesof migrating birds perchon the wires davening.I like Rosh Hashonah latewhen all living are countingtheir days toward deathor sleep or the putting byof what will sustain them—when the cold whose tendrilstranslucent as a jellyfishand with a hidden stingjust brush our facesat twilight. The…
Except that the wounds also bleed inside.There is no difference between being rapedAnd being run over by a truckExcept that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it.There is no difference between being rapedAnd being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnakeExcept that people ask if your skirt was shortAnd why you were out anyhow.There is…
