Eternity:
I am seven and forbidden
a book. If I look down I'll puke.

The house:
Blue with roses ascending  
up the side. Insides smell like

Pa before he died:
Cat, cotton, paper.

My hands: cold and stained red.

At the cemetary:
my stiff fingers, pale sun, I don’t like
the carved out space I know waits under me
while I pray

I met someone all stretched out
with kindness and life experience
minus a college degree. One year
younger and shameless love for
every band I socially deny.

He is dangerous and confides in me
glibly that two girls still love him.
He probably has a propensity for cruelty
and girls whose hips fit extra small
in his cello hands, his piano key hands,
Lord forgive me, his wonderful hands.

I have seen the teahouses
carved into cerulean arches
that make a delicate reach
for the sky. From within,
smoke traces the same path
from the ends of cigars and the
infinite "oh" of many mouths.
The rafters converge in beams
of light, the tiles are etched
in holy words, the wrist of a girl
bends a perfect curve-
Another arch within arches,
hands, wrists, windows, doors,
mouths and words,
the sky.

And your cup lip dips into
a tenuous moment: a question
only form can ask, into an answer
you've known forever

It was something mundane—
rinsing dinner plates, folding my underwear
into temporarily neat squares, letting the cat out,
when I remembered
the thick spice of crumbling maple leaves
piled high and burning; cinnamon and nutmeg,
woolwash and lanolin wafting from my hands.

You're wearing a soft pumpkin grin, huddled by me
under the groaning red barn,
under my grandma's knitted afghan,
under the silver dollar moon,
jolting at ghost stories, lantern light licking at your
thin mouth, dark hair dusting the cold tapered hands
that I press to the back of my neck in the October night

and I still feel the bones of you there.

What is it worth now?
The dishes need rinsing,
there is laundry to fold,
the cat is crying to be let out.

I used to hear the ocean
exhaling in a pink bellied
shell. At night, shadows
fell against the windows
and my prayers swelled
to the moon. I melded myself
into old polaroids, made
enough tears to quell others'
happiness.

Now I swallow nothing
but the bitter; I pray with
braying laughter, savage
dance, muscles cramps.
Sweat stains on autumn
days are Holy. The past wades
only as high as my knees
when I'm kneeling.
If I need to hear the ocean I take
myself there, or I press my ear
close to the people nearby. I know
them and the roaring exhales of
their oceans inside.

It was an accident
but my dad kept crossing
his legs, looking to the window.

None of us thought
the chick would make it to
morning. It would sooner

drown in the oncoming
thunderstorm, be picked off
by another set of jaws.

I am resolved
to teach my children,
“Nature is cruel.”

Next morning, the chick
is gone but birds are singing
and there's hope.

He could be anywhere.

Her eye sight was starting to go
years before I was born.

We frequently conspired that when we hit
the jackpot we’d spend it on ourselves.

Her communion gift is a ****** Mary basin,
collecting dust instead of holy water.

Near the end she switched grandpa’s photo
with her own, wrinkle free at nineteen.

Weak tea, fig turnovers, cats scratching behind
the cellar door—my memory is a dulled down

knife, whittling her scent from an apartment, to
a shoebox, to the celibate earring in my palm.

Her ugly wool Christmas sweater sits
in the bottom drawer—

I take it out and do not cry
but I worry that I did not know her.