The girl has begun to stomp sidewalk anthills
with her delicate and dimly probing feet.

Bewildered insects swarm like static
broadcast through destroyed cities.

I’m thinking of actual cities, of Orson Welles
and his radioed apocalypse driving families

frantic into the street with damp rags pressed
to their mouths. And nothing but a low-hung sky

when they get there. Nothing but the last
tired clutches of autumn, a kestrel casing

the cul-de-sac. If they were afraid of losing
something then it was because this was the first time

they realized they had it. It’s baffling how used
to being alive you can get. When I was her age

I watched fields pull past the school bus window
and wanted to know something about how

other people did it: the tall boy committing
a summer to his neighborhood’s lawns for some

indecipherable hourly rate, a bank teller engrossed
in opening rituals, someone prepping vegetables

in a strip mall pizza closet. From beneath each
of their sweat-lacquered brows, embossed awnings,

cursive neon placards: I’m still looking up. In Babel
it was the tower, destroyed because no one

who wanted it could understand one another.
No one could stop their fevered bricklaying, turn

to whomever at their shoulder and say Yes. I believe
this can be as great as you do. But we’re mired

on this sidewalk in our parallel backstrokes through
responsibility. And I love her, this girl who looks up

as if to ask me to tell her what she’s doing. Or to stop.
But I am drawn away toward the sky, a fresco

of gathering clouds. She tugs my sleeve to turn,
an alley—we’re on our way to destroy something else

by misunderstanding it. Her pink galoshes
map a mess to the maw of the storm.

I had a thought I meant to keep
as I was driving north on I-95 past new construction,
but it’s gone now. Something about

exit signs. Unfamiliar landmarks.
Blurred vision. Rear views. Gone.
There’s no easy way to hold

words behind the wheel
and there is far too much space
between seat and middle console. Here

and the silk between your shoulder blades.
These things get lost
so easily. I read somewhere

that if you sneeze going 60 on the highway,
you’ll travel 50 feet with your eyes closed.
Is that how the universe does it? A tickle and look:

apocalypse. The time I caught you,
eyes wide open, my bottom lip between your teeth.
For a week, it bled every time I spoke.

Because people I love are dying.
Because where I live
the sky behaves
like the brow of a gloomy child.
Because the door
that used to be red
isn’t one bit sad about changing.

This apple’s been dead for days,
but if I pare away
like mama would
I can get to the flesh
still sweet.

You lay in the morgue, a slab of meat,
a child feigning sleep, white sheet hiding
your face. You lay faceless as a trout
—you lay like a last bridge. Stiff as a saint
in bright drapery, a ghost, a goat, pre-sacrifice;
a needle about to know thread; panicle
of dark about to be blessed; a net, sewn
of rindless hope; your boots,
slumped soldiers, wilting monkshood;
your arc of ribs, a ship wedged
at shore—all that green gone sour
in moonlight; your children twigs and branches
at the window, knocking.

Half awake, I half dream my bear of a father is luxuriously resting, digesting, dreaming what bears dream. Maybe streams, trout, a bellyful

swimming under an old shade tree, its dead half a home for nasty, tasty creatures, its live half growing, glowing green, hanging thirsty over the cool water

of this neitherworld, half gone, half here,

its moons half hidden, wounds half healed, doors half closed,

my life half over, more than half
asleep. Thinking maybe living isn’t what we think. Sometimes life’s not even alive,

just an empty seat at the table. & me, making dinner, slicing scallions & jalapenos to feel their green heat.

& my father saying as he does every night, you’re still wasting your life.

& me, eyes tearing with onion, telling him, as gently as I can, you’re still dead.

Night Abortions

I dream your abortion
of me is a classic movie.
Every night, a re-run.
The Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion
roars twice
before you unwind the coat hanger.
Your body,
so young in the blue dress
in the dark bathroom.
Background music, “Honest I Do,”
Jimmy Reed from the black transistor.
WHOD, the “station of nations,”
it sounds all wrong.
Strip-cut to you/raise your legs
on the braided rug,
you push the hanger in,
and push, and blood.
The technicolor delivers.
Almost the end of me, then—
you stop//crying.
Your legs still raised wide,
no credits/no fade/
your fingers
so delicate, still
on the black wire.

Skyland at the Santa Fe Railyards

Rose painting thin black stripes on her
white Impala, tapers off toward the tail light.
She’s kneeling on one knee by the 40 inch wheel,
backwards hat, dusty black boot—
She turns: There’s a lot more of us now.
Us? I say.
Women lowriders. We’re riding on Saturday
in the Square—you should come.
I’m leaving tomorrow, I say.
Oh, too bad, she says, pointing
to the younger women helping her—
Trak, Marcy, Felix & some young gay guys:
Trak, can you get more black paint,
it’s in the truck.
I’m standing watching with strangers,
tracking the lines of her jeans, thinking
I know sky/land, the feel of the railyard, how
can I know her more?
Rose squints up into the sun:
Whatdya think?
I think I was born an accident, spread across the highway,
pointing back at myself, sprawling.
I’m thinking I want new air, a new
hole in the sky & how did she get so tough?
I say, It looks really good,
thinking I’m stupid for saying that,
she’s a full-bodied running poem, horizontal
& vertical at the same time, she’s
wheels, hydraulics, burning hot metal,
flaming me into wanting her,
low & slow & just now red orange
silver flying past, the Rail Runner
from Albuquerque, & just now we are children,
grown women just now in this Skyland,
on our way to death or love or
just being found.

The hole is a pepita. Lentil, small in its bigness. This is huge,
the splaying out on a plastic operation table while they suck out
this small bundle that is me, that is him, that maybe
was waiting to grow or maybe I’m anthropomorphizing or creating
characters from dead limp-hanging fabrics when it’s not right to weave
narratives about small people who aren’t yet people. Maybe I hurt
only myself imagining the lentil as a blonde ray of summertime,
tiny bare feet in waist-high grass hunting
wild strawberries in a thatched green field, sucking
the sticky off fingers and dirt between toes and the spitting
image of my father when he was eight. I love you,
I apologize. They’re analyzing you at the hospital lab.
They’re throwing you out with the trash.

Faint signal. The moon forgets
what day it is. I'm headed home
to and from the unwritten.
Coming out of a turn, the wind sweeps
the drapes straight out the kitchen window,
all the remembered lives.

The sound of a pressure cooker
like a self-conscious release
of laughter. And a gas cloud

in deep space gathers itself, tuning up
like an orchestra —bewildered particles
smitten with each other the way
last night a bow kept sweet-talking
the strings, a veil of silver
rosin sifting down, dazzling
the cellist’s glacial black gown.

I am no longer fond of the couch. Resting has become repugnant
to me. I hear the poem rush by. To go fast is better but then

more quickly approaching the end. Today I am reading the label
on the handle of my ex-husband’s VA-provided cane. I will

figure out how not to make the noise when I’m standing
or the face when I’m taking the first step. I’m putting some

roast chicken like a poultice on that poem, bearing down
like an eraser to rub out every bad thing. Dad’s body might

have looked like a fire at the end. I step on the poem. The blood
tonguing up like flames. The whole room on fire bringing it back

to bones. Dad enmeshed in the invisible poem—Mother would
have said we wuz robbed—his body the last thing he had to endure.

Climb it. It is Time. It is the man

just standing there on the tracks

and the train speeding toward the man.

It is the thing that is electric touched

briefly to the spine. Then brightest

morning followed by darkest night.

Climb it. It is time. It is she who sat

down to a platterful of petals once

with a fork and knife. (You.) Who

refused to kiss the boy who

begged her to. (You.) Who

wrote the letter that might

have saved his life, and then

threw the letter into the fire. Who

wrestled a star to the ground one night

with a damp towel, and now, carrying

that, must climb the shadow of a ladder

on the grass for all

eternity into the sky.

At night, in a collapsed house we find a wordbook
with an alien word in it—nepenthe
in an ancient language.

It means a medicine for sorrow. It means someone,
somewhere, something that makes one
forget the ache of the soul.

At dawn, right before the bombardments start, you
leave to hunt for water, wearing a jacket
with a giant serpent at the back.

At noon, I find the tail of the serpent by the remains
of your body, then I carefully wrap
one of your teeth in it.

I do understand the absence is a form of presence,
thus I carry my medicine in my pocket
until it stings, until it stinks.

Found Post with New Ending

Yesterday I was at the memorial park for the fireworks with my child. He was playing on the big metal slide with a bunch of other children. There was a boy between 5-7 years old, no parent in sight, hurling rocks and sticks and pushing and kicking other kids and just being rough. I told him twice to stop throwing sticks at my son, and another parent also scolded him for throwing a rock at her daughter aiming for the back of her head.

I sat and took the boy’s hand, looked into his eyes’ soft steam. There was a rope so thick around his throat, it had worn its way into his skin. Love cannot walk around unreciprocated. I loosened my collar and showed him my neck. Some scars stay with you for life. Some fade. Some cause trouble. Some scars make all of us stop breathing.

Morning Palindrome

Sun between the tangle—
Dust motes in my head.

She takes a dive at me,
a hedge sparrow

protecting her young,
until her eggs hatch.

They don’t all make it.
Deflated sparrow on the flagstone
swept away into the tall grass.

Why so lonely the voice in my head asks?

Maybe it’s that sound the screen door makes
right before it clicks shut.

*

Right before it clicks shut,
maybe it’s that sound the screen door makes.

Why so lonely the voice in my head asks?

Swept away into the tall grass.
Deflated Sparrow on the flagstone,

They don’t all make it.

Until her eggs hatch.
protecting her young.

A hedge sparrow,
she takes a dive at me.

Dust motes in my head.
Sun between the tangle.

At first I don’t see the breeze in the field, but soon the teardrop leaves on the little black walnut dip and sway. Then a swallow lands, disturbing them, and turns its quick bright head. A cardinal draws a swift red arc across the yard. At the edge of my roof, three wasps build a nest smaller than my fist. Yesterday, Patti said, Try to give up your attachment to outcomes. I pay her to listen to me. It’s hard, she said. Twenty-three years ago, I waited for someone hypothetical. I hardly thought about real clouds, their filmy mass, their curdled smear, flattening above me.

Double-parked in this cell phone lot
awaiting the text to dash to you,
turning my ringer up just in case
the short in the radio chops
our new favorite song into morsels.
Guessing the summits near
this concourse more likely than not
to delay my discovery of your belt
unfastening, mirrors checked,
hazards on, left with the tab open
to Target scrolling my sight blue
to keep from worry about our
arrival to its land of the defective
caster plates that will steer our cart
toward aisle eleven abrupt as the next
pretzel we buy. The app updates,
now says you landed eight minutes ago.
Lord, less is less unless I ask for more
help, so please keep the oxygen coming.
All over, you walk. All plurals zero.
My tail lights blush. The year goes shy.

It’s weird to know you’re going on a trip, that it’s
inevitable and won’t be pleasant but might also be
miraculous, and not know when.

My younger friends have been waiting for news.
The first thing I tell them is that at the end,
you bleed all the time.

(I asked my older friend, who has already been,
and she said, Oh yes, that’s a sign.)
The only other thing I’ve learned so far

is that you have to lay out three pairs of pajamas
at night for “costume changes,” as my husband
calls them. The sweat starts at your hairline.

It reminds me of the Play-Doh barber shop toy
I used to have where you turned a crank
on the side of the tiny person and the Play-Doh

hair started growing through the holes in his head.
This amuses me in the night when I’m toweling off
and shivering. The whole thing is a lot like

being twelve when all the girls in my class
were waiting and we knew who had gotten it
and who hadn’t and I spent the night at Miriam’s

and she showed me her diary which she could literally
unlock and how she had decorated the day she got it
with stickers. I got mine when I was thirteen,

which meant Miriam had an invisible power
over me, like the power I have over you
right now. Which is interesting since I’m losing

my power. Or that is the story I’m being told.
Actually, I’ve been told very little.
Miriam and I knew more about what was about

to happen to our bodies than I know now.
I tried asking my doctor some of my many questions.
Do hormones cause cancer? Do people still take them?

What is excessive bleeding? Isn’t all bleeding
excessive? How long will the whole thing last?
She laughed hard at that one.

About the hormones, she said, We’ll cross that bridge
when we come to it. Well, of course we will,
it’s a bridge and we have to keep going,

but I’d like some more information on how
the bridge crossing is going to go down.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
The narrator stubbed his toe so he decided
to leave his country and try to get to Solla Sollew

where such things would not happen,
but he had so many troubles along the way
that he was able to teach all children

not to run from their problems.
I loved Solla Sollew.
The harder it was to get there, the more

I wanted to go. The landscape was desert
and feathery bushes and sudden cliffs,
and a pink bridge that curves upward

covered with pink canopies shaped
like wishbones and all of it looked like
it had just been drawn.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted this poem to be written by George Clooney,
when he was acting the part of Moses
acting the part of a mountain arranged behind layers of fog,
and, later, the carefully carved stone walkways,
carved into the mountain
and carved, too, into the concrete applied to the mountain
so it satisfies the look of a “mountain” in the 21st Century.

Where every mountain will eventually commit to falling down.
Or getting worn down.
Or kneeling at the feet of another mountain range nearby.

Like that Brady Bunch episode
where one of the girls was having an argument with one of the boys,
and they just needed someone standing between them,
so they brought in a young George Clooney, who played the part of the bush.
And Peter setting fire to the bush.
And everyone feeling comfortable that the little boy frantically screaming for help
from inside the bush should be the voice of God for this scene.

*

I was once a regret. I tasted like cough medicine.
I was poured, like a thick gel, over the desert,
where I lay inert. Flat.
I was an obstacle to many living things.
I was useless.
I was the smell of a hot day,
or a city every day in summer,
or people congregating, waiting in line.
I’d taken a bus to whatever this event was.
And nothing was what I’d intended.

*

If there were ways of reading that included my body reclining
while someone else in the room was reading me for my intentions,
my background, where I attended school
and which schools rejected me when I applied,
and the two of us were a language,
a “poetry,”
then it would be clear that “poetry” belongs in quotations.

Like a longer poem by James Schuyler,
how happy he was to be living with friends
and observing them all morning.
He was reading them like they were a language.
A love poem.
Along with the complications of loving,
like joy and wry humor and anticipation and anxiety,
but the anxiety has been reasonably attended to.
It’s the most loving thing you can do.
Like trusting for some period of time that time doesn’t have to stop,
like a sentence that was always leading to a semicolon instead of a period.

When I'm a dog
I curl into the hollow
of a lemon

When I'm a dog
I chase wet shells of
apocrine & eccrine

When I'm a wolf
I leave the stone frock
Sewn-ache itself
By muscle into each

When I'm a wolf
I chew tendons
ochre & rust

chamber, ardor, thrust

“You two need clothes for school,” she says,
parking beside the massive gleaming box.
Hoisting us up, first me and then my sister,
our mother mails us into a sea of people’s castoff clothes.

“Pick out things you like,” she calls through the deposit drawer,
voice warm and distant as the setting sun.
We paddle through men’s trousers big enough to crawl inside,
flowered dresses, hidden boots that stub my barefoot toes.

My sister waves a scabby-looking vinyl pocketbook. “I want this.”
“She said clothes.” Checkered skirt, raincoat, gorilla suit? Tee-shirt
of a TV show we’re not allowed to watch.
Outside our mother hisses, “Someone’s coming, hide.”

We burrow down like mice as the fear of footsteps
crunches toward us, breaths held against the deep moan
of the metal drawer. A garbage bag flies in
and lands beside my sister’s tangled head. She does not scream.

Two more bags thud down. Then silence. We are bursting,
splitting like old seams with the effort of waiting to be told
we’re safe. Where is our mother? My sister clutches at the purse
while I pull on a pale blue cashmere sweater

whose brown stain on the front will be proof
of the dinner (bowls of stew, plates of bread and salad)
we three sit down to every night at the table I keep
in the locked box of dreams.

The elk take their places. A man
stomps houndstooth from the treads
of his boots. Tomorrow it will be
almost the same, but not quite.

The elk, full of bitterbrush, will eat
less ticklish stuff, licorice and iris.
The man will wear a red jacket.

Every day the man will shift a little more
of the mountain from the trail
to his stoop. Every year, in the place
a calf snaps a branch from an aspen,
its trunk will grow another eye to watch
the shade clouds drag over snow
and forb, an endless slo-mo show