my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

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

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

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

a folksome, gruesome opera
of gauze and malcontent.

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

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

my father holds
his favorite drink

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

here is the sky in stop motion, flickering,
a still shot in monochrome

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

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

I count my homes—
those of my scattered youth
the sanctuary of our young family
the intermittent rest stops
of apartments and vacations.

Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.

There is so little left of the tomato plants.