Poetry

If there are infinite universes, / there is one in which my daughter never turns / blue.

I held you when you were a baby, / the smallest particle in my universe

Watch the water drip and shine / from our fingers.

I am teaching my son / the art / of touching / a woman / or man

All day I hear this version / of the alphabet.

She carries the dark seed / sown in her tiny wrinkled brain / before she was born.

Your children ask for their birth stories / and you sew a more dazzling quilt each time.

What is the shape of cancer?

I believed / it was a piece of the national flag, / dyed by the martyrs’ blood.

Hectoring squirrels bent heads down. / Starlings fretted at lips.

So I grasped for salvation // and found eleven reasons to hold on.