Poetry

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.

For years we spun in circles, you dizzy, / undiagnosed, sleeping your life away.

we are chalk handprints & broken pencils / watercolor spills seeping through the Ikea / table, metal folding chairs, all a miss-match

Consider his laughter, the sound of explosion / the slivers of lizard that land in his hair.