Poetry

Teach her what to do when she loses you. / Don’t say Heaven. You don’t believe it, / neither will she. Say anything but sleep.

You believe in fairies / and leprechauns. / You believe birds / can fly to space.

I can’t recall / How to breathe / But you don’t notice / Grab my sleeve and tug / Ready to go back up the hill.

And now, his eyes drooping like commas / he settles a sentence / lies down in a pronoun / the O of a cradle / the space bar of nap.

She has psoriasis; he has mites. / Are you ready to do what I did? / Otherwise, otherwise, otherwise.

[B]ut you don’t know / whether to count the little phantom / girl still galloping around / under your skin.

I need to see only her in my own life, / to understand her, what it was like to be a woman terrified always.

Whiskey / is the perfect color if what you have / is a singular capacity for swilling / embers.

What speck, what sun, what cluster became / what fig, what plum nestled in my trunk

They hadn’t seen me the day before: / free-climbing ballerina out of the music box

The smallness of / this long day, / minutes parceled out / by tweezer.