Poetry

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.

When you could not describe pain, you screamed / until I felt it. Your eyes like a cat’s saucer, licked / clean.

Love has small hands, a voracious mouth

how a bird carries in its being nest / carries tree carries light into blue into sky, every name for home