Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

I don’t
know why
I’m in the garden
kneeling on dirt

We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

I am still waiting for the lion

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray