April

On a winter morning getting dressed
is the last thing you want to do.
Stand in front of the heater and it's like
being in an oven, but you step away
and shake with cold.  The car is running,

it's dark blue outside.  Won't someone steal
the car God please won't someone steal the
car? I haul my doll house (what a
burden). Their soft faces smile
at me.

Don't they know? Has no one
told them? Don't look at me I just
sleep here. On the chair, behind the couch, behind
the door in the back room of these walls
I sleep if I can and I do try.

I split in two, ribbons of my body
unroll from around my core--
a neat pile there on the cement
out front under the florescents, which cast
everything here with a yellow light.

Even the shadows have shadows.

They say he's handicapped and dumpster
dives, gets stuck by insulin needles.
His daddy lets him cuss, doesn't yours?

Say you love her even if you don't.

Forked Road

Claire often was said
to be the most
beautiful.  Her mother
kept her in a glass
box on her vanity,
only opening it on
holidays.  She would
rather like to open
books, she said, but
her mother fed her
carrot cake and dropped
a Polly pocket into
her hand.  Her
father was a religious
man and would
read her bedtime stories,
never leaving out the scenery
or unsettling end.
He would leave her
skylight open
so she could see the stars
and get rained on
(never in the same
night).  She lived
like this until her mother
died, and her father, widowed,
married the church.
On her nineteenth birthday
she emerged much
a girl, talked to rabbits.
She never looked
at maps but would
walk in straight
lines and, finding
herself lost, would
nest with the owls
she found there.

Creation V.

(creation five)

From a distance, the earth looks like this:

composed of molecules and atoms,

it tilts right ever so slightly to make

winter and spring,

each opposite to one another and so

attracted.

Making the elements was the hardest part.

The stars brainstormed

for hours,

chewed the erasers on their

pencils, charted up how each would

fit together and decided at last

to leave it up to science.

How and why gravity began only Einstein

knows, though his dust has probably

floated up through the soil

and rejoined the cosmic race.

But through mist and grass and rock and hail,

through salt and weeds and trees,

caprice remains.

So it goes.