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…
Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs, slipping her hands beneath the white feathers, biddies murmuring in prayer. The warm globes felt like hers, the same way the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck did not surprise her, the same way the knife had missed her toe – of course it had – when…
I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape. I would use the word secret, but it makes him restless, as though he were a child and I used the word tomorrow; as though he were dying and I used the word tomorrow. I walk the house I built before…
Nine chickadees hunch in the packed snow of a tire track picking spilled seed. They look so suddenly earthbound, as if they are what scatters from the sack, blind in January sun, sharp scribbled feet stuck in the drift, so many careless darts – I laugh and laugh. Love comes to this: forgetting our wings,…
Books of advice, magazines, secret cures, formulae, strident pages stiff-legged and shouting expert in the public square of the indomitable truth, snapshots of the honeymoon, paradise in silhouettes, champagne, a silver script: it all flares up so eagerly to flame, takes the match like a lover’s hand hungry to dissolve. How urgent to abandon others…
Look in the mirror. 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…
