Poetry

sucking into themselves like I shied inward when asked, How is your father?

I was reading about exoplanets, places where there might be life, places with open seating, place settings made of iron and clay, where no one’s heart is closed

in the morning after

Lady Horikawa wrote about her tangled hair

later the poet ordained as a nun

Against an achromatic morning sky
in the pewter kink of a scrub oak limb
a gray squirrel, tensed in a quivering coil.

In the woods on the other side
of your chain link fence where does
and fawns paw at the frozen dusk
and a lone fox slinks across a clearing
on the prowl for something vulnerable

My too-soon-dead ex and I honeymooned
in a rented cottage on Sanibel Island.
We walked the beach that first afternoon,

noting the pink scalloped roof
that would guide us back to our boardwalk.

It begins with the smallest of breaths:
a cough, a voice split into seven veins. We joke with the coolness of broader perspective, suavely side-eye our parents.

Curled in the center 

                       she is fixed

           to her  

                       atmosphere

                                  torn strips of silver

does it end, forgotten darling—
the earth
your rope
what it feels like to know?

My skeleton hides, teases, 

makes burlesque 

adjustments: peek-a-boo 

rib cage, scapula.