I can not find the letter mother left me four days
before her death. I read it once and then placed

it in a cardboard box like you might a dull
knife or a ******* tin. The letter is

a part me, like Van Gogh’s severed
ear was to him. I want the letter

like love or sight; the way bone
                               needs marrow.

red blue
and
green
water lilies
unfold
and
move the
wind parade
through
our
temple souls

You have slaughtered my kind without
justification and planted red mums
to line the new concrete sidewalk
to your church; Sundays,
as you traipse our roots
we will listen to your
sanctimonious
secrets.

Some are lissome, jowly,
blossomed or pocked,  teeth

of old horses—eyes white as flour,
a few clubfoot with sisters

pregnant as October gourds.  Not
Norman Rockwell’s Americans,

but they are us and live in lopsided
bungalows with leaky roofs,

heaved sidewalks, bare
refrigerators.

Maybe Hell is our fear and Heaven our hope both of which were spawned by someone taking different meanings from the same night sky.

And maybe not.

i am the shattered glass, cold on the ***** floor
swept and disposed of because i can't be used anymore.
my pieces are scattered, ruined and cracked, unable to be fixed, unable to revert to intact.
i am a tainted shard, scratching and severing all that i touch
with jagged edges, i seem to pierce and graze the ones that i love.
pieces of me have dispersed left and right, pieces of me that i cannot retrieve nor can i rectify.
and after you swept me off of the cold, ***** floor
you simply selected another glass, so you could break it once more.