Afterglow

 

Voting rights and travel +

 

Within Without

Please hold my head as gently 

as a bomb labeled 'headache'

knowing the earth is waiting

feeding time under the loam

who is it who knocked on the door (we didn't hear)

who is it who wants to come in (we can't really see)

howling into the cusp, dreams away from disaster

learning the circuitry of sadness, the lineage of loss

For in a different world 

I lost many months ago

my tongue a tombstone

fingers clawing worms

Full

My babies are beautiful. 

(These human babies and also the two puppy babies asking for scraps by my side.)

At's Home

It's a school night and Nu had to head to bed at 9, but Scout and Huck (and Big A and I) gave At a proper bonkers welcome when he got home from college. (We'd asked him to come home last week when the number of active cases had spiked on campus, so he tied up a few organizing loose ends and agreeably headed back.)

Our governor has mandated no in-person classes from tomorrow as part of our three-week "pause" anyway. 

The one thing the pandemic has given me is bonus time with my first-born. And also, somehow--the time and desire to disappear into a long, hot bath.

Auspice

They tell me time is a thief 

I plant surviving memories

for there is no cure for life

as there are no answers.

There is history to my grief

geography too--I wear what 

was done to me--uncertainty, 

a sadness, the calls to flood. 

Someone--carry my disbelief, 

it is heavy as a civilization.

I read skies to déjà vu myself 

greying--sometimes--silvered.

Ill

I don't know what's left to say:

here's pain; here's my armor

still songs beat in my heart

return me to myself, kids.

I have become a ghost; I go;

I was gone for a generation

until tears filled my prayers

swam into years of sky.

Return me to myself, kids,

I belong to a god who has 

never even once killed me

the press of axe is only ice. 

When surrender lies inside me 

I... will shatter--into your accents

your stories, curious superstitions.

For you, I will... love unfinished.