haunted
by the retelling of stories
that refuse to be silent.
some long spoon continues
to slip inside and stir
things up.
layers of wallpaper
that continue to flake
and peel, revealing rings
like the birthdays of a tree.
candles lit,
we sing each time
a new print reaches its hand through
the pit papered in floral,
stripes, mint green,
orange,
the candles burn all night
long, keeping me awake.
forest fire.
my sins and the sins of
the fathers are my cage.
drowning like the white
rats with their red eyes
and aunt jean grimly
dropping the trap into
her bucket.
the riot police shot at my father
as the church burned to the
ground and my baby brother
sat naked in the bathwater
before two guns.
crying down the rhein,
tugboat merry and fevered
as the horizons shot out
before us,
cannons barring the door,
no end to this river.
the second unseen mouth and
its forever hunger
a wailing newborn
the men crooning at my glass door and
wrenching at the handle as i listen
from the sill above, midnight,
is midnight dark enough that
they cannot see the ladder
to my window and its
broken lock? the city lights
shine every bright.
this city never sleeps.
today is mother’s day.
seventeen women raised me, not counting
margaret, ancient woman in the
apartment below, purging detroit’s
hymnals of jazz,
wrinkled, cheeks like baklava,
paper thin, honey sweet.
my heart of jade,
cleansed only by communion cups,
my rudder tongue steering
us toward another iceberg.
the way a wedge in a tree trunk
widens the crack,
so does each of these soot-crimes
slice through my roots in the sky.
leaves yellow and fall,
frail and crumbling,
as holiness is leeched out
like a mineral returning to the soil.
i’m telling the same stories and swinging the same
ax over and over like a music box that
will not wind down,
sliding doors that catch at the heels of
passersby, a tape that skips,
the wallpaper layered so thick
that the room has shrunk to the size of a thimble.
i sag with the weight of the past while
today papers over a new shade of
coral and white
placid and teasing
each creak of the rocking chair
reminds of the next earthquake and
the last earthquake
and the whole history and future of
earth fighting earth and tearing itself open.
i tremble on my still porch,
watching summer’s dragonflies hover over nothing.
