Life is different—both too slow and too fast. Too slow, I am not quick enough to butter toast while it’s still hot or catch him when he falls from that one step before the fireplace. Fast is just a word for how time steals him from me. It steals him in his sleep—a new boy …
StopTake a breathWhat do you see?A teardrop stain, like dripping condensation on a windowIt smears against the pad of my right thumb.Green fingers of an aloe reaching out and to the lightRotting soilA black gnat sitting on a spore.My hair is everywhereComing out in clumps it hangs like Spanish moss from the branches of an …
Continue reading A Meditation on Place
I loved him already. Sitting in front of my grandmother’s old house, a new family in the window. I steal a rose from their front porch. They were hers—the roses. They could live there for a hundred years and still the roses would be hers. And mine. And his. I press the rose up to …
Continue reading Bruised Roses
When do you reject the child?When she is born, her dark hair spiralingFirst cries brimming out into a hazy, too-bright roomOr when she is messy with her mourningIn a body that’s no longer hersCrippled in the hands of someone that she thought she loved. When do you reject the child?When she is knocking at your …
Continue reading A Poem for America
I wanted him to love me Until he said it Until he took the words and shoved them into syllables that I could count on just one hand. The words The way they sound inside his mouth The way they look inside the air Hovering before his face Their viscous form, blood red Like strawberry …
Continue reading Strawberry Jam
Softer now—my heart and how it melts and pools inside my chest. That’s what happens when you have a child, they say. But still I feed the fear both in my sleep and in my waking hours. Someone is always next. I cradle my sweet boy. The men inside my family all of them always …
I am selfish with him—Behind a locked white door in bed we lie, never leavingThe world wants himWhile I am scrambling for time. Split halfway in two when he emergedMy body stitched together, much of me left pooling on a white tiled floorLabor of the body and of loveBlue lips and knotted cord—Is he breathing?I …
We pick oranges. I can see the sweat on his Miami Dolphins t shirt, and on his upper lip.
The Wild Heart of Life 