Poetry |
“The Mothers”
“The mothers watched us, / and we watched them, my mother working clay, / Barbara’s mother, long at her easel, Jean’s mother, / swimming and sketching.”
Poetry |
“Translating the Body”
“Our organs sing in different keys / like sirens in a sea of blood. / The body feels before it knows.”
Poetry |
“Ice Cream Truck”
“We will have cones, please. / Vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. / We will have the whole ice cream truck / and the street it is on. One serving / of the fence by the water. The water.”
Poetry |
“Walking to Synagogue on Yom Kippur” & “A Rock Is Not a Stone”
“… and before I could recall her name, the daughter / said: Who is Maya? and I thought, She’s not an angel.”
Poetry |
“The Lunch Lady: A Pantoum”
“What was her story? We didn’t care. / She was just the lunch lady; / the one who forced us to eat our sandwiches. / I can still see her reaching into the trash.”
Poetry |
“The Needle and the Thread”
“I live inside a book, the girl says to herself / We are all alive inside a book / That’s what you think, says the front door.”
Poetry |
“Histoire” & “Idyl”
“When I lifted my violin, the men at the bar // begged for Skynyrd, not Coltrane. / So I volunteered to be lonely.”
Poetry |
“Bitter Greens,” “Matisse in the National Gallery,” “It Is What It Is” & “Field Notes”
“If they could speak, they’d sound exactly like / those cranky ladies slowly poisoning themselves / on front porches up and down Brenwall Avenue / in 1964 …”
Poetry |
“Scrubbed”
“The house smells like candles. ‘It’s my birthday!’ I say. / It’s not. My birthday over, nothing left to celebrate, I rinse the pot, heave it / back on the stove …”
Poetry |
“I Want to Be an Adirondack Chair”
“I want to have a front row seat / when the neighbor’s paper gets delivered // at four am.”
Poetry |
“Nothing Takes Me Back Like the Sound,” “Lilith Dreams” & “Lincolnville Beach”
“Fractal facts of our existence / matched us up: we are a species // that sees archers, horses, heroes / in the sky …”
Poetry |
“On the Island of Sark” and “October 8th”
“You, gorse: I slow my steps / around the thorns you bare to take // the blood of the unaware.”
Poetry |
“Little Brother”
“You cough in your sleep and I almost pray for the first time / in eleven years. Just because I’m not religious / doesn’t mean I don’t want to be.”
Poetry |
“As if Confusion Were Part Of It”
“I remember standing in line by the river to be baptized. / The heat had soaked our clothes. There was singing / and honey locusts perfuming the riverbank. And flies …”