Poetry
There is nothing casual
about casualties of war.
It is serious business deciding
which of the wounded
get Medevac’d or left behind
on the battlefield.
It is not the ones
with the most severe of injuries
who are transported
elsewhere for treatment
but the ones with the best
chance of surviving them
that make the trip.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
You can’t desire to catch the sacred fish
as much as he desires to be caught
& yet
he darts through the dim depths
with tail swerve & swish
laughs with the joy of glistening fins
at huge holes in your net
through which he swims
To get the shining coin from his mouth
is worth selling all you have
To get him even better
Everything you know about him
wavers in uneven light
Denial
This has nothing to do with blackness.
This has everything to do with blackness.
Anger
I could break things
but everything is broken.
Bargaining
Maybe I should have left
with the slave catchers.
We are the lay of the land— / pocked, hilled, knowing every ember / and seed imprinted on our bones.
While he was in jail, two policemen / came to his apartment, took / all his books, sat at his kitchen table / drinking his coffee, and cut out / the forbidden words: kitchen / was first to go;
There were two sets of stairs: the front ones curving and formal while the backstairs rose steep as a canyon wall. As a girl, I used to fly from their heights when I wasn’t falling.
The amaryllis bulb, dumb as dirt, inert, how can anything spring from this clod, this stone, the pit of some subtropical, atypical, likely inedible fruit?
We all knew it would come.
Someday. Always later.
Mañana.
It comes for us all. Sure.
Of course.
We know that. Someday.
Mañana.
But when someday draws near
for someone you love
whose silenced breath sears
your lungs with flames of grief
and sobs so immense
you wonder:
How dare the sun ascend?
The stars to shine?
Even the yeast to rise!
Eschewing perfection, they knotted in a flaw,
the human signature and kink that made
the carpet whole -- not less perfect, but more
for the fraying edge, the bleeding dyes
that cloak their treasure in disguise,
an act of indirection modeled from on high:
as when the Deity said Be ...
and out crawled -- the twisted,
the crippled, the deformed.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
Touched your hem / A thousand times / A face just / Beyond my sight / Space between / Grace, grief
My husband, he die
without water in desert.
Walking Saudi Arabia --
no jobs in Yemen
for policemen
from Somalia.
My strokes are halting, not like the imagined fluidity
of the monastic scribes, hunched, by candlelight,
over some ancient text, perhaps the Our Father,
being deftly rendered in the thin black liquid
of a gently dipped quill.
From their sublime to my ridiculous work
in colored calligraphy markers
purchased at the local drugstore.
But my text is the same, the Our Father;
except mine is printed on the inside jacket
of the pocket edition of a scriptural rosary book,
printed and published a mere forty years ago.
Bach wrote his solo cello suites as études, not for performance./
Imagine, the arpeggios of the first prelude, forever private, /
His friend Martha's making soup, because you still /
have to eat. Meanwhile, back in the Garden /
No, nothing,
she says, that is not God’s, and we approach
a crow ripping the entrails
of a truck-crushed fox, and the crow flees