Your kick was powerful and it was very challenging to change your diaper. I actually felt this kick when you were in my tummy, which made me think you were a boy.
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I was 14, older than him, capable of stopping him. But I’d been caught off guard when he said “Hey, c’mere,” and I just stood there, paralyzed, looking at the cat, the bucket, the hose on the ground next to him.
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A glued-together castle vs
a single deep-breath.
In your eyes there is always
either fire
or white flags.
Waited for reality to prove itself.
Gravitated naturally toward the gutter.
Heard sewage down there.
Crouched down, peeked my head inside.
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My mother, who left
to live in a safe house
next to a sheep farm,
ate lamb chops every night
in college we burned in the dark
thinking our lives would be romantic
When I think about you in prison, so medicated
you couldn’t hold anything
in, I want to kick the guards’ teeth
The New World arrived
when we were unconscious
Her round, though in places pointy, head — which contained her now trembling eyelids and quivering lips — panned the room slowly. She heard a soft rustling, like a dragging blanket.
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At New York’s MoMA, Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910) is attacked with a straight razor by a local college professor of physics, who after screaming “I am the fuck of your reality” stabs the image of a full moon in the painting’s upper right-hand corner eleven times before restraint.
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I give my arms a more thorough wash in the farmhouse sink then start to burp the blue drum barrels of sauerkraut.
From the window I see the older child in the yard, slapping his hand on the flat stump of a recently cut birch.
50. In late 1992, on their first date, my parents saw The Crying Game.
51. On Wednesday, Mom quit family counseling.
52. I make my bed. I lie in it.
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In the morning light, the void of thy lips
Parted as the ropes of the bee skep