Parkour

He’s a walking expiration date.
He leaps loose-limbed parabolas
Across the courtyard,
Sends his body like a yo-yo to skate
Free along the gravity of walls
Before he goes flying,
Half-way up a flagpole before I shout
“Impossible,”
He only trips a little,
Brief points like pins in the wind,
And I’m afraid of heights.

Yesterday when he was in the tree
Playing Babel with his bluffing brother,
The leaves shook and broken branches
Smashed up through my chicken feathers
To nestle there,
Chiseled bamboo rods in the blankets
Of my isolation, and I saw all the prepositions
Woven like hay into his hair.

Sometimes when the blood makes beads
Like garnets in the craggy fault lines of his scrapes
And they’re safe to touch,
I sit and watch the pride brown his skin,
See recklessness unfurl across his forehead
Just beyond my reach.

Empty Tip Jars (Revision)

Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific
At her hips settles the silt of another salt-rimed day;
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

When the curtain fell,
Fireflies charged the stage
Light-frenzied and shrouded in wings.

The clouds crowd her ears and she drowns their traffic,
Stringing shells in the cave of her skull—
Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific.

Like lace cages,
There was a grace in her fingers;
They littered the black panels.

Bleaching in the evenings, her legs snap and bend white as candlewicks,
And her hourglass knees crush the rocks as if she means to pray:
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

By then, sirens in the night
Had lost the shock of train whistles,
And only soothed the city deeper into its midnight mire.

The blue burns a bridge across her nose redder than forgotten brick;
She pauses in the afternoons, her lungs breathe hot delay.
Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific.

They say when you’re gone
Your air goes with you,
Your body blowing its landlord temper.

Lost in a coastless nightmare she swims miles to kick
Wet and grasping from her ankles like seaweed from the bay,
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific

I’ve heard some people throw clods of earth
At the box, muddy between the hymn lines.
They say it’s for the living.

Around her eyes the past creases dark and fish-quick,
Its clam edges burrowed sharp as oysters into the clay;
Her hands, empty tip jars, curve to cup the Pacific.
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

Sine Curves Immemorial

Slammed out flat in the shade beneath the tree of firsts
That bends at its creaking waist to draw forth a lazy retort
From the river lying summery and fallow in its concrete,
She twists a little to the left; her toes shuffle themselves.

Yesterday she walked through the glass in the garage
Like a tottering, milk-plumped fakir when they’d just said not to,
Bit red twin wings into her thumb to keep from yelling
Loud as the exit door of a nightmare as the shards clinked
Arctic and lovely into the bloody measuring cup.

One night when the wind is wedged up against the white house
Like a self-defense instructor pushing fifty and desperate
To prove something, she’ll sit all knees and elbows
And teeth in the center of the temporary bed playing insomniac sentinel
Over the little city of cups on the carpet trapping spiders
She doesn’t have the heart to kill, and wait for company.

When the kindergarten teacher with her brown shield of hair and a message
Told them to go through the classroom and find something
Worth as much as they were and come back to show
Everyone, she brought back the coloring books and wished
She’d been as clever as the kid with the basket of pennies.

Because the bedroom fort never brings his amusement to a bore,
She plucks alliterative picnics from the sleeping bag’s acrylic weave
With pinched fingers as if they were dining on imaginary nits
And pulls his four years and hoarse giggles into the warmer shadows.

Empty as Tip Jars

Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific
And at her salt-rimed hips settles the silt of another sundried day.
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

When the clouds crowd her ears she drowns their traffic,
Stringing shells in the cave of her skull that deafeningly sway;
Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific.

Bleaching in the evenings, her legs snap and bend white as candlewicks
And her hourglass knees crush the rocks as if she meant to pray:
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

Heaven burns a bridge across her nose redder than forgotten brick;
When she pauses in the afternoons, her lungs breathe hot delay.
Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific.

Long gone, lost in a coastless nightmare she’s swum miles to kick
Wet and grasping from her ankles like seaweed from the bay,
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific

When around her eyes the past creases dark and fish-quick,
Its clam edges burrow sharp as oysters deeper into the clay;
Her hands, empty as tip jars, curve glassy to cup the Pacific.
The words she wears drop to the sand limp and less specific.

Hadassah

Prayer swelled my stomach, a white smoke
Charring wide chalk satiety over the walls
Of my larynx, a graffiti dessert,
And I walked in thirst. The women
That I’d gathered as empty pottery,
Vessels around a droughted well
Never rose, the yeast impetus of their souls
Dormant, hungering. Our mouths
All dangled gaping from a single golden stick,
Felt the metal pry our teeth loose
As the day warmed and waned
And the gold became meat became corn.

We lost our tongues in the sand
Felt scorpion stings pierce our tonsils
And string them up as pearls
Around a dying neck, fingered their curves
To keep conscious of our belly walnuts
Hardening in the sun behind the silk
Falling like tropics bridges
Between asymmetrical monolith knees.

When the water came, I felt it harden
Pink and selfish between my earthbound eyes,
And in my throat steamed a wet suspicion
Quiet and wholly unholy.

Trees

She’d dance for children
Hiding from their parents men
From their wives women
Young and hopeful from their fathers who
Had come just the night before to see her
Become a tambourine enflame the evening
Shoot her sparks
Like wayward bullets to a moon
That only barely gave her sight
And used the coins to buy a knife
She’d carve the trees
Slice clean through the bark
That slowly gave
Rimmed her fingernails with dirt-flecked
Sap whose smell never left
The rags of her everyday dress
Over a body only half earthly and cut
To cut for cutting leaving
Messages almost dry and freshly
Piney for him she built
Their trysts out of leaves
Rolled crutch twigs between their bodies
And wrapped her songs
In wood she felt every branch
Smash up through her ribs
Bamboo torture and swallowed the sting
As if it were syrup she began
To cry in resin alone
And the yellow tracks down her cheeks
Browned by blood and shadowed sun
Would make a map for him to find her in the dark
Beneath the trees when the world shattered down into
The clay of four greedy hands she
Wrestled thinking he’d build a home beneath
The shelter of her diaphragm
But kept the knife for when he left
And when he did she threw her
Hair out over the sky a last canopy
And severed all her roots to keep
From wondering whether their lights
Were worth a shovel.

(Gap-in-the-story poem about a character in Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer.)

Salem (Second Attempt)

It was the screaming that drew me
ripping raw as sex up the trumpet of my throat
and I tucked my innocence like wax to cradle into white forsaken
crescents behind my ears that have never felt the yellow heat
of sky even for a moment, because I could scream


In the night when I had again pledged my soul like trousseau linen
in a word basket to our lord and savior amen I used to dream
I could scream and my hands would rake the air like ploughs
like a kitten at a curtain just at dawn but what is a scream to
ears unbaptized by any more than decibel docility


I sprouted hips when I learned what it was to be witch and bled sounds
I’d only ever read, a whole new vocabulary flowering red in my
limbs flailing I knew suddenly rave and dance and fury
expelled every last vowel of restraint to lodge the new
elliptical breath of rage, I found craze and swallowed her whole


When the fire comes I’ll let him have his turn, burn mortality
soot onto their spectacle-smooth browskin as they watch
me drown in ways they never will because they will not learn to swim,
have lost liquidity to their iron bones shelved tight into a Bible
that knows no breezes, freezes faster than I could confess.