Poetry

I bend my neck / for Mother’s blessing. I might be clay. / I might be dough.

Still, the forsythia comes back to us, / and the persisting / morning ice, and sun melting it.

consoles me like we are still children / now that I’m no longer carrying one

in her infancy, I could lay one of my daughter’s feet / across the pad of my fingertip, fragment of a cloud.

no matter / how the rush of days lets me forget, there is no other way. // This is not keeping house. This is caring for things

Unsure if I should bother with metaphor / I decide to tell him about my high / school gym teacher who labeled all / girls Mabel.

I want him to see / depth is not something bodies grasp, but an art our minds develop // to gauge love’s slap.

shares a creature’s pain / raw red sorrow

I am in this basement throwing bar stools.

by which I don’t mean just the touch / (the rasp of a voice is a thing I love)

a girl is Shiva drinking ocean poison