Poetry

We leave our families and your dead
name at the shore. Or, they come with us
and we’ll tread water.

Tomorrow we’ll row our steady skiff along
the shore, explore the margins of our years
until we find the point that thrusts so deeply
out to sea it seems we’ve left the land
behind.

Pink in the sky! Lit by a rising sun.
Framed in bared branches’ tentacles,
reaching up to touch soft, cotton-candy-
colored fluffs.

You’re not using your good fortune,
think of your sisters’ mental diseases—
of Syria, Jerusalem, seething,
You should be doing more, the inner voice nags.

At the starting line of my white
suburban guilt, I first foresaw a tweedy
liberal blue-blood in my future,
a family friend. Then—God forbid—
a disheveled manic angel.

to say whether or not I am ashamed
of the moving or the witness, the whiteness.
My mother said: a scar is the temple veil at dusk sewn together out of panic

We beat the rain from hanging

undershirts & sing like nothing
the sky can do can rust the birds

from our mouths.

On the kitchen wall some faux-antique signs (about what family stands for, about what
home means) that’ve had time beaten into them with socks full of nails.