Poetry

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.

when I read the news
and try to put out the flames
that crawl across my skin,
forget it. But my tongue tastes
like ash. My hands wisp into smoke,
hold nothing but history.

I play the twin birches like a musical instrument:
missing is to lost as go is to leave.
To the spider bags or sacs of flies
woven like god’s eyes in the trees’ hips
I say, batting, batting, the quintessence
of spring. If the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul.

If the heart were a pond, woe to thirsty birds
in winter with nowhere to light

At night I think about my mother —
how she no longer inhabits
all the rooms in her body.

I wonder if in her dreams

she walks outside or even flies
over the corrugated roof.

When somebody says, “I wake at 5 a.m.,”  
they are from New York City, a place  
where you need to get out of my way.

Come to my reading. Name my people
and get me wasted. I can’t write
in the same room as Favorite Boy.