Merry Christmas. Now you fools can act like professionals. (pick a letter.)


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poem. early draft.

Because Everything is Capable of Being Broken

A mocking bird made her nest

at the top of a telephone pole,

and I sat in the grass watching

a hawk eat her babies one by one.

She threw herself against him,

screaming with a broken beak,

his blood, her feathers

dotting the sidewalk.

I could see the babies in his throat,

one dark bulge. The last baby's head

stuck out of his mouth, suffocated

against the bodies of the others.

The hawk wobbled over the mess,

small branches the mocking bird had gathered

for her eggs. He digested his snack.

She was tired, crying against the hawk,

me, the street, the live wires

until her featherless belly broke open

with sadness and she fell

into the grass beside me.

There are children that you do not get,

but our hands cannot choose who we love

and who we should not love.

My sister took her stillborn baby

out of the freezer and sang to it,

her chair facing the window, and I watched

grief settle at the nape of her neck

the same way pleasure can, aching like a loom,

and I thought about how in the beginning

I used to sit with her and tell her stories

of Mary and Elizabeth, how they lugged

their bloated bellies for miles looking

for quiet spots where they could sit together

out of the wind and lift their dresses to look closely

at their stretching skin, the hands and heels

of their sons pushing outward, and how later

they pushed their full breasts to the mouths

of kings and saints, wincing at the bite,

the smell of black hair, the sound of feasting.

I remembered the night she lost her baby

I dreamt that I found her body at the bottom

of the drained pool in her backyard. I wept

when I finally found her round and heavy in bed.

I pressed my ear against her belly, still and emptied,

and I assured her that there were still stories to tell of Mary

and Elizabeth, how one way or another they would throw

the scraps of their children's bodies out to compost.

Because everything is capable of being broken,

how can we rest? Somehow we lift the heavy crates

of our unborn children everyday.

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Notes on a Night Swim

ROAD ENDS AT WATER           

Three-quarter-fat moons

A mauvish, immaculately grey man-made lake, edged in woolly, unruly pine tree cutouts

Glen Miller from a car, with a bike in the back seat

Virg: It’s times like these that I realize why I’m glad I’m not fat.

Everyone else:  glad I’m not: ungrateful, sick of life, of the unexpected. planned. pretentious. afraid of water. afraid of letting go, letting in, giving up. afraid of what they think. glad I’m not dumb, too old, too tired to learn, to change, to go for a swim, when the road ends at water.

Virg: This is why everything I have breaks (lightly touching her grandmother’s chains and pendants), because I have no regard for them (hands to the air, and back down with the released trinkets, a pair of wings and stones to her sides and chest).

Balancing acts.

Virg: She said, you may not be able to do it now, but you will in one lifetime.  I admired her optimism. You have to be grounded to the earth.

What’s that marker for? I asked.  Virg: There are models weighted to the bottom, waiting for headlight photo shoots.

All hams are hit and miss.

Virg: Well I haven’t perfected my routine yet.  I’m only 22. 

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