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Different Ways to Bathe
She’s of an age where a little something sometimes appears in her underpants.
Self-Portrait
I don’t want to go to the neurologist, but my family insists something is wrong because I am rhyming words and predicting the weather.
Braids and the Meaning of Life
As a child, I was in awe of girls with braids. Girls whose hair was set in strictures like Sunday sermons.
God is a Catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana
God is a catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana and we would eat Him on Summer Sundays after Mass.
FDA APPROVED OPERA SERIA
The distorted face has always been her forte. The distorted face is the contrabassoon. I’m grimacing.
Invocation
Kingsessing in Southwest Philadelphia is a low country of porches and brick. A long green edge where Cobbs Creek keeps the seasons and the city sets its weight down
When the Veil is Open
You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers.
In Passing
The copperhead slithers along without bending / Its spine. The ridges on its underside are like / boot treads. / That was the example I was using / Until he thought I was calling him a snake.
(Maternity) Leave
There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings, after your husband has gone to work, when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back.
Laws of Motion
once, you said everything keeps moving until something stops it / so I wonder if it was time that slowed us / or the quiet between what we meant and what we said
Please, God, in the Event of Dictatorship
Allow me to run from America and, if it be Your will, / Have Germans roll out their welcome mats / As America opened her arms to my parents / When they escaped Berlin in the ’30s.
My Therapist Shows Me How to Write in the Affirmative or An Alternative to Writing “Don’t Kill Yourself”
stay kin stay kin stay kin stay kin / stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive / I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to / stay alive stay kind stay be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
She Replants
The family tree is gnarled and warped. Witch’s bony / knuckles and fingers sprouting from a dark corner of the earth. / It hangs like a curse and blights the lonely apple that grows, / hiding. A thin branch reluctantly bows to its weight.
Moon (as translated from the Hebrew of Nathan Alterman)
Even an old landscape has a moment of its birth. / The strange, impregnable / And birdless skies. / Under your window, moonlit on the earth, / Your city bathes in cricket-cries.
[a go phone shivers something important past outdoor seating pints and appetizers]
a go phone shivers something important past outdoor seating pints and appetizers / while the quiet trumpet flower springs bright jazz with a deep throated calico reach / like schoolyard entropy with a slow universe heat death blasted from lily depths