Poetry

Dome of the rock
dome of the belly

every diaphragm
its own firmament

waters above
from waters below

eyeglasses flecked with salt spots
remnants of our oceans

When I decapitated the sunflowers today, the birds had already
pecked them mostly bald. I sawed through those thick necks with
silver shears, squash leaning to cup falling petals and black seeds in her
green palms. I was cutthroat, ripping this food from the garden. I knew
how fierce and warlike the small wrens had become, and, sure enough,
there were the fearless nails in my scalp, clawing for my soul.

This spring, we’ll gather for a third time
since we first lost our forebears, martyrs to a cause

they did not choose for themselves.
Beloved grandmothers spent their last nights alone

in crowded hospital rooms while officeholders
deliberated over the what, not the what now or the how.

This morning it is minus six degrees.
The old woman at the corner with her bundles
says yes to a ride, but is, at first, unwilling
to say where. Then she does say and tells me
as a girl her grandmother kept three hundred chickens
which she tended every morning before school.

She says a Chinese man would come to separate
the roosters from the hens. Apparently they look alike.
In storybooks there’s no mistaking, but it seems
in real life, one must be outed by his crow.

My bones have been scraped
free of flesh, free of tendons,
muscles, veins—my heart is gone.

The marrow in my bones
is disappearing fast
and I am fragile,
dissolving into dust.
With a gust of wind
my cells could scatter.

All I wanted was work,
not the old man’s joyful tears as he ran down the hill.
I was afraid he’d fall or burst his heart to kingdom come.

Now what?
My head still pounds from yesterday’s wine, father’s ring hangs heavy on my finger,
and after all those years of pea pods, my stomach aches from too much fatted calf.

I didn’t want that damn banquet,
my older brother pacing outside the door, muttering into his beard.
But he’s right: he deserves a party more than I do.

And next?

“Awake, awake …
clothe yourself with strength!”
—Isaiah 52

“What Really Happens When You’re in a Coma”
—Cosmopolitan (Feb. 5, 2019)

You dream I’m looking down on you
like a light on a ceiling
as though you are a thing

and I am a thing,
a light you aren’t,
shining down

on a body
you can’t escape
even in dreams, like this one

in which you dream
you’re awake, trying to awake
to the light that holds you together

Touch me and see, because a ghost does not
have flesh and bones as you can see I have.
—Luke 24:39

So easily startled by vastness, dark
distances, arrival, they were terrified by him
that night glimmering in their midst.
Jesus knew they needed to finger the familiar
relief of bones under warm flesh to believe
the body, pale star
studding their peripheral vision, a specter
rattling even Peter, who had seen the not-
ghost of him before, walking the sea. Jesus
knew their need to know he hungered, tasted
the tilapia baked in olive oil with salt, lemon,
tangy fingers to mouth.

the vast

              and all its definitions had dumbfounded. I bit the hand
that fed imagination, took

for pestilence, the flies. For end-of-world, the gully washers.
I shook in handfuls
petals fetched from

                                                     doubt