We lived in a stone farmhouse at the edge of town. I’d been assigned to process asylum claims and you’d come to write about the abandoned homes in the island’s interior the government was selling cheap. A family of barn swallows lived inside our...
Every wife must apologize for not being her husband’s mother? But he will not forgive you. The absence of his mother's kiss is the scar of repeated wounding. He marries you too young, before he littered his seeds along the road. This is why he...
I know not what to do— My mind is reft. Is song's gift best? Is love's gift loveliest? I know not what to do, Now sleep has pressed Weight on your eyelids.
Shall I break your rest, Devouring, eager? Is love's gift best?— Nay, song's the loveliest. Yet, were you lost, What...
I turn on the radio and hear voices, girls becoming women after tragedy. Talk about dreams! His heart was covered in a thin shell the color of moon and when touched, I grew old. The best movies have a philosophy...
You are the problem I propose, My dear, the text my musings glose: I call you for convenience love. By definition you’re a cause Inferred by necessary laws— You are so to the saints above. But in this shadowy lower life I sleep with a terrestrial wife And...
I admired the sea, most days, but not the heirs or millionaires sailing in stiff-capped winds, buttoned for summer. After all, we were the spectacle, two women touching in all the wrong places, furnishing rooms with no children in the hull of a house gone still. She had...
Things happen when you drink too much mescal. One night, with not enough food in my belly, he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he was hot and generous and so the least that I...
When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship, she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea: perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil, cinnamon, and henna. I...
Someone tells me the earth and everything in it will belong to me if I catch the horizon before sundown. I sprint, kicking up dust all the while. It seems I run with everyone in the world standing on my kidneys, eating my head. What’s...
Mommy taught 3rd grade Her book was The Longest Way ’Round (Is The Shortest Way Home)
I was an adult Before I realized How True
Their marriage Is none of your business You don’t understand Your parents don’t owe You anything You finally say to yourself: They Have Nothing I want Except I remember this Blue...
I’m giving a chance to the parts of me that need to come home. For you, my lover, the concubine of my truths, I’ll tell you one honesty: the snake plant’s need for water & the soil’s need for fertilizer every 4 weeks. I...
Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon You have the scene arrange itself — as it will seem to do— With 'I have saved this afternoon for you'; And four wax candles in the darkened room, Four rings of light upon the...
It is abominable, unquenchable by touch, closer to the sublime than sentimental, more animal than hominid, I’ve seen it in the eyes of birds weaving on a stem of ragweed, voracious, singular, there is no one like me, Dickinson in her narrow bed, her cold...