Love hours.
When you cover your
face with hands,
light dims.

I enter your interocular
space, to understand the
truth ofdissent.

I am learning
from you about the black
theory. You wanted to-
take titanic steps
in small feet.

Human facts.
I cannot breathe.
You possess the power of
manipulation.

A bird doesn't know.

Five powerful privet hedges formed
a fence in our front yard in New York.
My mother planted them for some
reason, known only to her.

The branches grew sparse and suffered.
Failure to thrive.  Knee high to my
twelve year old body, it never bloomed
in that yard of green weeds and dandelions.

It was meant to keep the
dogs away.  We had feral cats
in the yard.  My brother and I
were feral.  My mother bred us
into the wind of 1940's Chicago.

So that was that for her.  She
retreated into madness from
Chicago to New York to
South Bend.

Fences, like my mother's
addictions, are not always seen.
They crawl up your leg like
flakes of hate.  They keep growing
until your eyes are holes in the
twigs.

A fence so thick you think
only prayers will let you out.
Easter Sunday blooms in
the trailers and filaments.

No relief.  They scratch
on your so small soul.  White
privet petals crawl into crevice
and crease.  

I no longer itch but
tic with the rhythm
of the seasons.


Caroline Shank

It were not you
at the end of poem. Something
of moon had died.

Time has not come
to intervene in parting
of lips turning blue.

You will not change,
in offering the drink of
stunning Venus flytrap.

I want a new literature, something
closer, before the white froth of
language spreads itself on the
sand.  A new book to read, a
clean beach over the world of
my youth.  My mother burrows in
shallow ground, is a bird pecking
its way out.  She drapes herself
in feathers.

I need a new literature.  Something
to hold above the wound where she
rips in and out of me like a
door. A new book to lay over an
old story.

I sift through the silt of this
shore where my world is
dug up with tin spoons.  I grow
old in the quiet of my age,
hear the sound of freedom, see
the last tears run into the
ocean of my regrets.


Caroline Shank

My children were the mothers of my soul.
Each of them took me to places I had
never been.

When they were babies I learned
through trials the fears that croup
doesn't **** a 3 month old,
that my daughter wore Holly Hobby
and never told me she hated it.

I learned the Sears catalogue by
heart and always bought the 3 pack
of whatever they had on sale.
They never complained.

I was amazed that my daughter
spent her only 50.cents on an
owl for my collection.  Ruby lives
with me today.

They were mine until they
started school.  Then they
we're feral.  

My stretch marks crawl across me
like fuscia rivulets.  I have
left the itch of them behind.

I am a grandmother to strangers.
A mother to voles.  I bred
them out like songs I can no longer

hear.

Caroline Shank