Poetry
Evening
A driver holds open the limo door as a diplomat steps in. Closer to the center a man leans over the edge of an upper balcony and shakes out his pink duvet. What is he hoping will drift loose: a single lost eyelash, the memory of her body, or does he only wish to capture, …
[white paper #15]
and then when they couldn’t afford it but they did afford it they hired Cecil to wash iron clean once a week my mother picked her up and took her back to the colored section of town and once she had my mother to lunch with her friends and sometimes they prayed together including the …
A lick’s a mistake a creek tries to forget,
a creek’s much bigger, something the river must accept. Except Crummies Creek, which enters the Cumberland as just a puny stream, having been dammed thirteen miles up its mouth and made to flood the mining town. You’d need to boat to the middle to feel as if it might still be in there, deep, current …
Makeup
Blind now, my mother tilts her chin up, closes her eyes to receive the liquid foundation I stroke across her brow as if bestowing a benediction. The last time I touched her face my fingers were small, her glamour a mystery. I smooth and blend the beige into fissures bracketing her eyes, nose, and mouth. …
Night in the Boxer Rebellion
In the crimson room there are seven sweet buns that have risen from dough spiked green by mugwort juice, and eleven letters from our family in Liverpool. A sepia diploma from St. Anne’s hangs on the wall, an American barricade stands outside the window. Next to thirty-four strands of hair oiled in lavender twisted through …
A Promiscuity of Spines
You have a synecdoche dream. “One day, my dear, it would be sweet; It would be very fine indeed, one day, If all your books and mine Were stacked against the future, Packed on the same set of shelves Under the same star-proof ceiling Somewhere with a mountain And maybe a lake.” …
How to Eat a Quince
Note its pregnant portliness, as if beneath the skin a blinded bee bothers the inner skim of pulp and elbowed room. Say to your lover’s face that she is not a fruit to be betrothed to, other honey apples or shapely pears take that win. Then you will see the quince for what …
In Glasnevin Cemetery
The ground is heavy clay and the heavy spade a live thing in my grip as I cut the ground. Pale sky, pale rushing clouds, a sister’s hands sifting your father’s ashes on your mother’s grave. Your sisters stand and watch, their lovely daughters gathered in close as this one last time you gift …
Hy-Brazil
The island glitters in the middle of the ocean, an arcane city built on a living form submerged at the deepest part of the Atlantic, a green star flickering, only to vanish and reappear somewhere else. I have seen its other side —the dark side. It moves along the ocean bed, occasionally coming up …