Poetry

Sometimes I wander around wondering
where my mother is. The family buried
her next to her own mother. Out there,
the hard pines darken early. Anyone
can hide and not be found for years.
Bobby Cherry laid low there. The girls came
in his dreams...

hovering their mouths 

like two men 

moments before 

they turn on each other

that is how the grass smells 

In a nondescript hotel in East Texas, I fell
in love with a couple. There in the dim

hallway with rugs that were clean enough
but darkly patterned to hide the stains so who knows,

her back was against the wall, her arms up and around
his neck...

the hive swells outside
as its residents itch to lick our inner walls 

for moisture and respite 

I am the man in the play-
ground, the cord of his earbuds

clenched in his teeth
(bit in a horse’s mouth)

if this city is still breaking me  
in with its weather and tethered eye

you be the arch in my neck 
the mane growing from it 

I moved into the haunted house
and gutted it to the bones. I wasn’t alone then,

and worked there as a team. 
We evicted squirrels from their vast nutshell nest,

filled dumpsters with fifty years of trash.

My mother is alive and funny
in the house above the marsh.

I think she does not miss my father much
as he is still alive, though elsewhere.

Suppose we were there for some event 

we did not want in on or did. Faith flung 

so hard, the cage I felt around me was 

no cage, just fear, in a summer-long wither; 

10.

Dad, you look like a doll
I wouldn’t want to play with, boxed
in your casket. The mortician
tried to paint you pretty.
I wanted to be pretty, too, but mom says
makeup is inappropriate for funerals.

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