If Your Hands Are Full of Fire

The book from the archive

whispers with handwriting. A gold pen shines

the name of every man,

his every hand that closed it shut.

If girls ever read, they were crossed

out. The gilded slashes still burn

the wounded. In the right environment, they say,

every cell can bloom astonishing

in a petri dish: petals of poppy flowers

spring from the incurable, the inherited

twist into the heads of sea monsters; even

the most tainted cells, which some might believe

ugly, transform disease

into little clots from a wet fountain pen

paused over a sentence in a letter

or dark bodies illuminated

in a window at night. In a dreamed place,

my blood glows with pinpricks

of light and each chamber of this genetic

heart is instead a nautilus shell

washed up from ocean-deep, revealed

in the green flash. A tragedy

is how a girl’s name disappears from a family

tree or the way a wooden house

stands on the edge of the river

but never is allowed

to touch the cool water, to drag

its fingers through the current of hair.

In the night, I am that house. Father,

is there a way to call you back?