

Maternal ArcMATERNAL ARCMaternal Arc
She feathered her home in early preparation for an empty nest; strung up quiet heat, cactus prickles. He watched her
constant back and forth motion over the cradle, pried open her hands when they clammed.
Followed her slow descent into the nursery, where she would eye their sleep with longing, wonder at the taste of mourning and if
she could postpone it by plucking them and eating their hearts from the cradle.


Finding things to wearFINDING THINGS TO WEARFinding things to wear
I.
He hopes that his shackled box full of
collected beads of prayer will not tomorrow prove an empty catch;
hopes never to finger the holes in
his net and wonder if a tighter stitch
would have held his reaching better.
II.
His wife finds morning in baskets, pockets herself in deep covets, folds in origami shifts;
to brush her hair is to lift bones. When her daughters
were born she wrapped them in tissue paper, twisted herself into fences, began hanging curtains like
portraits of their leaving.
II


untitledWhen it turns warm,untitled
we load the car with dirt-crusted shovels and
dented jugs of water, a plastic bag of saplings. I wear
my mothers wide brimmed hat, tired sandals.
Planting in parks, we let the dirt collect under our fingernails, wave grubs as temptation for slow careening
birds, leaving them to shrivel on packed ground.
I leave room in the ground for earthworms and imagine my body as moist as theirs in dry earth. My hands have cracked with clay, fools gold coats my knuckles. I lick the saltiness from the edges of my lips.
Afterwar


SEEINGI thought I saw weakness in their hope, in one vision of the cityscape;SEEING
when what I saw was the iron grid, braced with electric swells; traced across the sky in grime and gleaming. I could also see:
the leaping in their eyes, drawn skin, the white of bone, dragging out of muscle, stretching dreams. I couldnt see:
moving water, light catching the windowpane, knotted strength in calves, possibility.


I am starved for newspapers:I am starved for newspapers:I am starved for newspapers:
one lover who cooks another, Darfur, and elegies in obituaries because I have looked at the world through you, America, and so I can see nothing but your money and your goals and Africa is in the corner of my eye, but I will name ten countries to prove to you that we do care and you should too.
America when will you send your eggs to India? We have kept you preserved in cartons for the fragile and now, I am sorry: you have been exposed but it’s okay because maybe that is what’s best
and maybe you will lick


For Oil and SoapFor Oil and SoapFor Oil and Soap
On the days when you are trapped
in the heat, my fingers morph
into whales. My knuckles, once
sharp, are wax and curve
like your wrists or seaweed.
My opposable thumbs have mouths
now which fix those fly-aways
with such precision that I wish you did
not own a comb, that you were
here for me to fix yours.
If those bristles ever melt
in that heat, let me know
so I can groom you, so I
can use teeth as plastic.


OrangesOrangesOranges
I.
Thinking themselves thieves, they feed
on the ripe as the cart owner on the highway
fingers peels, rinds, forgotten leaves and listens
to the voices of his customers like moving cars.
II.
To articulate herself she keeps the cream
in one hand and licks the rust off her
once black kettle. The tea is waiting
on the counter to be drowned as she says to him:
Let me live in my ashes.
Her echolalia says: scissors, sliver as the image
of diseased pigeon wings echoes on her eyel
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