You never know
what’s going to happen. Back then
there were more teachers than students
and I don’t think anyone grows up.
What if I don’t want to be promoted?
It’s like learning a foreign language.
Managing the cash flow was
the trickiest part of the job.

People knew.

I listened and responded to
their problems, questions, concerns.
Good citizens pay
bills on time, they show town pride.
I am grateful to live and work and appreciate
a good town we have for children.
Everyone works to find
common ground.

But I can’t relate.

Good work cannot be rewarded.
We breed animus and resentment.

that boy sitting next to her
with a slender, birdbone frame power
in his Franken-lightning hair, a hungry
edge to his jaw, who stumbles over Bishop
but compresses our breath with his words
undoes me in muted, fraying ways
the cuffs of my favorite sweater
slowly unraveling under years of continuous wear

his smile is clever and **** with drama
kept in the dark alley corner of his mouth,
strong coffee and bruises without origin

I didn't want to know how
under the soft tissue of my liver and spine
there are words that might taste
like a fire escape in Brooklyn
a night on a stranger’s couch
and how compulsory punctuation might be
only an afterthought to others

I am small in my galoshes
the sun reflects into rivers
of light, we are adventurers

my fried and I, lost boys hidden
under our lace and braids, together under
one second star to the right umbrella

the hale gray sky overturns in our eyes
We gather moss under our nails, dark hairs
tangle with violet march thistles

birds are dark spear heads thrown
from the earth. The world is raw, flawless
against our chapped lips splitting

into grins. We smear the red away like war
paint across rocks and bark, our arms
and cheeks. We are fierce and do not know

what it means yet, to give our blood
so freely. The rivers of light fade
into the evening. Shadows slide

from our backs and grow in silence.
The blood dries and flakes away
into nothing.

I pull away with the summer, my eye
loping along the quiet symmetry of telephone
wires.

The backyard trees are blots of ink,
nameless as their birds.

Mulch bags sway in reproach from
the neighbor's garden frames for

the marigold's I let die,
tomatoes never planted,

the acceptance that I could not grow
an apple tree from its core.

My tea cools in the indigo hour and leaves a
faded ring behind. The birds are thin shadows
without faces.

I. Anna Sophia, 1878

Her name unfolds like raw white hands
small zaffre eyes, hair gold against her neck,
while the autumn air wafts flaxen motes
the men return from the boats and fields.
She follows the soft ripple of black birds
taking flight from a great distance.

II.  Annie Axelina, 1901

Her ankles are angry chaffs of red rings
as she circles the harbor, Torhamn pressed
into a pale flower between winter’s pages.
She cuts across the black ice lea
with my stride. She boards a boat, daughter
wrapped in her arms, leaning into the gale.

III. Eleanor Maria, 1921

Her roses are blooming burgundy against
the blue of the house and the kitchen heat
curls wisps of blonde into gnarled vines
under her nursing cap. She sews neat rows
of nursery rhymes into a blanket, leafs through
a green scrapbook of poetry and recipes.

Her name echoes back wings and the yearning
lilt of a language not entirely lost to me.

IV. Elizabeth Marie, 1991

I started this year in heavy furs,
linens and velvet draped over burlap
dungarees, the sleeves and hems

heavily embroidered with salt and earth,
the egg white bones of small regrets
strung through yards of damaged hair

split at the ends, chipped china molars and
incisors, thorn and rue and columbine
dragging down around my heels, so

I could only stand and resign my torso
to the soft, dark peat and the lavender sky
consuming my silhouette, swallowing my body
in the slow thorough hunger of a snake.

Then I was somewhere else entirely,
planets turning sparks of endless light
in a cat's eye, the scar under my mouth going warm,

shedding my layers away to a cotton shift
and the sharp incision of your gaze.

Stalks of bronze leaves croon and
the manicured trees burst jade
against the sky, dangling over
tilted dark green benches.
I pretend to read,
trailing over the pages the oily noses of
dark-eyed, wide hipped nannies
willowy limbed women whose
scarves unfurl under artless chignons,
business men with careful mouths,
long, frecking strides.

He broke the fourth wall without warning and
my laugh was sporadic while I crumbled,
under the slightest of foreign touches, there,
above my shoulder blades,
where another hand
once brushed.