image

For Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.

image form

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband's coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Image version (original is also right-aligned but i couldn't do that in lemmy)

The first sound was the quieting
of my fingers brushing
the first, brief shocks of hair
from your head. Still. There
when our father said
we had five seconds to cry
before he’d get angry
or cry himself. When the child psychiatrist
watched you play
with ghosts, diagnosed
seems like a perfectly happy
child to me. Am I

both or neither of us
now? My fingers through your hair
aren’t so much fingers
anymore. My touch not so much
touch. Only breeze, your dark hair
like mine, this absence
you’ll hear now and for the rest of
our lives. Half-drowned
tree in the lake shrouded
in mist. Listening, beyond
the doorway of that haunted
shore where you wake
from every dream, our mother saying,
I speak with the dead. If I can

reach and hold across this always,
these galaxies, your forehead
like a steaming cup
to my lips. If I can mouth my silent swan-
song into you, know this without
my saying it: Brother,
lend your ear. There are many
different ways to sing yourself
to sleep. Like in your head? Our father pleads.
No, she mouths. Like I’m speaking
to you now.