Poetry

That God first placed an angel
with a flaming sword to guard
Eden’s closed gates, that He gave us
signs to declare a different logic,

In that endless season of dead grass
and rotted pumpkins, I was a boy
who stood in a tree and named all the cows

Spark, then fire begins. Fire pulls oxygen
deep into the box. Come, child, there’s something
I’d like to show you in the back of this

We are tired of arguing about who is the most hurt.
Better to toddle off for a little Chinese.
The locust flowers each year like cornmeal in the gutters.

They put their guns in the only boxes
that they had, and those the well-
liquored strips of gin barrels 

I went back to the city
we visited, to
the restaurant that

No one picked in the fields on Election Day. 
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff. 
The children sang songs like it was Sunday. 

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers,
perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade

Gathered in the yard, shed-side, pokeweed, 
black walnut, pecan tree all leafed and 
umbrellaing. My grandmother, the relatives