The War, the War, Christmas

My brother, given short reprieve in the form of six blackened tumors

Stacked like coals along his spine, will languish stateside until

The new year. Then he’ll learn to shoot the cannon he will aim

At strangers who will aim their guns at him, his pink scar and the same

Blue eyes he wore when he was born. I sit in the bathtub and cry—

Relief, dread, helplessness. Unless the mess at his back turns uglier,

By spring he’ll be in Afghanistan, and even if, by grace, he lives,

There is no chance he will not kill. I zipped him into jammies. Once

When he had a sore toe, I filled a bowl with Epsom salts, a rubber duck

Afloat above his tiny feet. I gave him books and modeling clay

And rubber stamps. Sometimes, scared in the darkest part of the night,

He dragged his sleeping bag to my room and lay on the floor near

My bed. I’d find him there in the morning, those mouth open snores.

I went to college when he was not yet three. On the phone he’d ask

Where my things were—my headphones, my pillow. I dreamed

My parents left open the door to the basement, night after night, that baby

Falling down the stairs. And now, awake, I think that dream is true—

Not him exploded on some desert road, but gone—that baby, that boy,

Without a lick of violence—disappeared. You don’t know this when

You’re young: how time kills children, every one of them you ever loved,

And nothing you can do. Oh, Annabelle, Annabelle, too, my own

Girl, once so fat at the cheek, so jubilant, noticing the moon, the pill bug,

Curved against my chest all through the night, Annabelle has breasts, tiny,

Like stones beneath the skin, like omens, and when I kiss her, whenever I

Kiss this little girl, I’m kissing her goodbye. This is the way I lose one baby

Every day. The war, the war, Saturday. Christmas. Goodbye.

Love Song with Cocoon Dream

It becomes clear that life is a highway awash

with horseshoe bouquets, the way we smash

into things, the way we scatter flowers--

but I refuse to believe in anything irrevocable.

That's why I'm careless, turn my back

when I smell the burning and dare flames

to turn a solid thing to ash. I want to laugh

when I think of my own age, of gray hair

and a wrinkle between my eyes. I want to

cry when I think of your smell, sugar

and soap, and of your purplish fingers

coming to nothing. I want to believe that if

we make love until the moment of impact

joy will spin itself around us like silk and soften

the blow of our own burning, our bouquets.

Elegy with Poetic License

In the morning, you are rushed

by birds. They lift off from a bush like

their lighting run backward, and all day

this rewind remains, so that you stand

when you sit, charge forward when you would

have shied away. When, in the afternoon,

you hear your neighbor’s son is dead

in Iraq, a roadside bomb, you don’t think

blood, shatter, scatter. Instead, in your mind

you see him becoming whole, every bit

of him drawn to his core like shavings to

a file, so that when darkness falls and you sink

into your bed, feeling like you have lost more

than ground, you might tell yourself

there has also been this other day, in which you

are not this cold, this empty, but a tree

full of sleepy birds, each one banking

her notes for another morning song.

Love Song with Godlessness

Between the skin and the sand--itch

and tingle, the tongue and drink: want.

To live in a city without God, touch

myself, touch you, with impunity--yes

we find ourselves in darkness. Yes

there is the fear of death. Meanwhile

your fingers open inside me like

a fan. What is wanderlust, wonder-

lust, if not the desire to escape

surveillance, to find the sweet, secret thing

and bury ourselves, taste it until

we can't tell the difference between

mouth and salt, word and kiss

until we can't think what it might mean

to be sorry.

They Say My Leg's Not Broken and Neither is My Heart

My father died in March. Today

I fell to the ground, skin-scraped,

and discovered only hours later

how it hurt to walk. It is as if

some second thing has caused

the pain without my knowing, as if

these tears and that dumb stumble happen

to different girls. I heard of my father’s

passing four months late, him buried,

mourned by everyone he’d ever loved.

I think I mean to say I’m strangely sore,

a tender spot I keep forgetting

not to press. And something else—I

mean to say another thing that keeps

Escaping.

Epithalamium with Late Adolescence

And so we find ourselves melting again
on a mattress. The sun rises. Flies drown
in a glass of beer that wets its cardboard box.

We have a kitten now, find it on the porch
and lead it through your dark apartment by
a line of cat chow, and even this stroke

and purr sends us back to bed. In these
bodies we must be rich men, every piece of flesh
a pocket of gold, so I keep dipping my hand

to see what treasures fill it. I keep
thinking we will fall in love, but we just
keep falling down and failing to rise

though the sun fills the ugly room, the beer
stinks, and it's too fucking hot to touch. Still,
we keep moving against each other

till it hurts. Maybe this
is a wealth you spend because it can't
be saved. Like pouring milk on the ground,

like cookie after cookie till your stomach
aches because they won't be soft in the morning,
like staying awake until noon, when

you'll have to pull on your jeans and go
deliver pizzas. I'll take a cold bath, admire
the way my breasts float perfect above

the water line. Think about leaving.
Think about you never coming back.
We are both of us weightless, aimless,

worried, like two train robbers
on a bender, spending up the cash we can't
keep around, the money that marks us

as dangerous. The bath drains
and I sit, suddenly heavy, in the empty tub.
I can't move. I miss you.

Girls

So many girls live here--the one he saved
with a deer heart, the one he woke with a kiss.

There is the danger of splitting at the skin, we
shoulder like muffins in a tin--the tall one,

the orphan, the acrobat--breathing our own
steam. We are so rarely what we seem, but here--

broken mirrors, spindles dangering our fingers
and feet--we are always naked and at such

close quarters, at every turn throwing bricks
and kissing hurt after hurt. All our toys fall apart.

There's nothing but crumbs. Some of us do our
hair while some of us stifle screams. We fear

spiders, splinters, mice. Some of us with our
polkadots and our sugar tongues, some with spines

and spit, coal eyes. There are lost princesses
and their own wicked queens. Here's what I mean:

we, sullied and sweetened and sly, are witches
waiting to eat one another, shoved together into

this tight place--a tower, a terrible stove--and no one,
no one gets out of this girl alive.