Poetry

Even her
birthday song is martial.  Even
her avenues are lined with
pikes.  Even her galleries
crowded on Sunday, her parks
larded with pigeons and crumbs.

a heady scent, breeze born
rises from
the lay of fallen leaves
crushed beneath the foot of man
decompose

within the crisscrossed limb, scratch
a path on boulders entombed

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