Practice saying you’re beautiful.
You must say this
out loud – you must say this
one thousand times
until your face believes you.
You must say this and see
the glorious and wounded
contours of the human frame,
your broken nose and hooded eyes,
creased skin, your crooked teeth,
you must say this
until your face contains
the tired man beside the road,
the woman in the field,
the boy in the cardboard box,
the girl beneath the hanging tree,
the mother’s calloused hands,
the father’s folded breasts,
the milky stare of old woman, man,
all begging to believe
that no one is invisible, you must say this
until it becomes a chant, a cry, a call, a cheer, a song,
until the willed imagination turns
to face the other faces in the crowd of self
and in that gaze that nods and smiles, the camera
– in the image of us all –
destroys and remakes the world.
Soap bubbles the size of silent whales float and founder from the wand of the prophet. Over and under, rippling in the swells of air, they roll and surge, at play until the pop that pulls them like a sentence back inside the lead. The prophet writes again: in each smooth behemoth a plea for…
for Janet Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again and you are free to tear through reedy fields shouting now, now, now at diving chickadees as if you were a dog awakened after death passed by, and now, all paws akimbo, means this time a sacred work, a wishing well, a friend…
Third Draft: In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother “Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits. Even my resolve not to have babies, elegy, effigy, small…
She bought the rugs in Peru where aji amarillo hung like citrine gems in the lobes of market stalls, old women, shriveled peppers, calling to the American girl lank in slacks, the languor of such heat dark in the roots of her hair. She didn’t take a lover there, but loved to listen to the…
for Claudia at 5 hours old There were two kinds of mornings the day you were born. We had the other. We whispered about you in bedrooms and then we talked in kitchens. We did laundry, folded sheets thinking about your hands, how they would be so small. We paired sock with sock and then…
Three, today, is the happy morning number of soggy robins in the closest tree, new blooms on damp petunias, cups of tea I’ll drink as I thumb Genesis, again, to keep on learning how creation’s never through. On the third day God made ocean and dry land, vegetation, plants and trees – mad synthesis of…
